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DEC  7  1911   *j 


BR  121  .B72  1911 

Brown,  Charles  Reynolds, 

1862-1950. 
The  modern  man's  religion 


TEACHERS  COLLEGE  LECTURES 
ON  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE 

Series  I 


^^/•. 


THE 
MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


BY  y 

CHARLES  REYNOLDS  BROWN 

AUTHOR  OF 

"the  cap  and  gown,"     "  FAITH  AND  HEALTH," 

"the  young  man's  AFFAIRS,"    ETC. 


TEACHERS  COLLEGE 
COLUMBIA   UNIVERSITY  1 

NEW  YORK  CITY  i 

1911 


Copyright,  I911,  by 
Teachers  College,  Columbia  University 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


PACK 


I  Truth  and  Life 3 

II  The  Worth  of  Incomplete 

Knowledge 32 

III  A  Deepening  Experience    ....     66 

IV  The  Practical  Use  of  the  Bible  .     98 
V  Fellowship  through  Service     .     .132 


INTRODUCTION 

Through  the  aid  of  generous  friends,  it  was 
possible  to  arrange  for  the  addresses  now 
included  in  this  volume.  Neither  the  ad- 
dresses themselves  nor  the  topics  with  which 
they  deal  were  arranged  for  without  careful 
thought  and  without  a  definite  purpose  in 
view.  From  both  teachers  and  students  alike 
had  come  many  requests  for  an  opportunity 
to  hear  a  new  and  fresh  statement  of  some  of 
the  fundamental  principles  of  religion.  In 
the  break-up  of  conventional  ideas  which  has 
been  so  marked  a  characteristic  of  the  gene- 
ration in  which  we  live,  many  intelligent  men 
and  women  have  lost  the  clue  to  the  meaning 
of  religion  and  to  its  significance  for  human 
life.  They  have  been  led  hither  and  yon 
by  strange  and  often  superficial  teachings 
which  frequently  confused  without  enlight- 
ening.    These  addresses,  by  a  consummate 

▼ii 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

master  of  the  art  of  expression  and  by  a 
religious  teacher  of  vigorous  and  indepen- 
dent mind,  are  offered  as  a  corrective  to 
teachings  of  another  kind. 

It  has  been  the  good  fortune  of  Columbia 
University  to  be  a  pioneer  in  many  fields.  It 
has  had  the  courage  and  the  foresight  to  ad- 
vance on  to  nev^  ground  when  advance  was 
needed  and  to  stand  fast  by  old  principles 
when  steadfastness  was  required.  In  setting 
aside  a  portion  of  the  academic  day  in  order 
that  teachers  and  students  may  assemble  to 
listen  to  these  addresses  on  religious  prin- 
ciples and  religious  truth,  the  Dean  and 
Faculty  of  Teachers  College  have  performed 
a  new  and  not  inconsiderable  service. 

There  is  a  fashionable  affectation,  often 
offensively  manifested,  that  religion  is  super- 
stition, reHgious  service  idolatry,  and  re- 
ligious discussion  futile.  To  those  who  are 
so  unfortunate  as  to  be  in  the  grasp  of  an 
affectation  like  this,  the  careful  reading  pf 
these  addresses  is  earnestly  commended. 

Nicholas  Murray  Butler. 


THE 
MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


I 

TRUTH  AND  LIFE 

IN  arranging  with  me  for  this  course  of 
lectures,  the  Dean  of  Teachers  College 
indicated  clearly  and  emphatically  that  his 
chief  desire  was  "not  to  have  presented  a  his- 
tory of  religion,  or  a  philosophy  of  religion, 
or  some  particular  system  of  religious  dogma 
or  ecclesiastical  method."  He  wished  rather 
"to  have  set  forth  in  direct  fashion  religion 
itself  as  an  experience,  as  a  life— a  life  to  be 
lived  under  modern  conditions  of  thought 
and  action." 

I  could  enter  readily  and  heartily  into  that 
desire,  for  to  me  the  most  interesting  thing 
about  religion  is  not  the  history  of  it,  nor  the 
philosophy  of  it,  nor  this  or  that  particular 
system  of  doctrine  or  polity.  I  am  interested 
mainly  in  religion  as  a  life,  a  life  to  be  lived 
more  effectively  and  joyously  because  of  the 
stimulus,  the  guidance,  and  the  reinforce- 

3 


4        THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

ment  which  a  real  religious  faith  offers.  In 
this  first  lecture,  therefore,  I  wish  to  say 
something  to  you  about  truth  and  life. 

You  find  men  to  whom  the  truth  is  always 
a  statement  to  be  written  out  and  printed  in 
a  book  for  other  people  to  read.  "Here  is 
the  truth,''  they  say,  "study  it;  memorize  it; 
and  in  the  great  day  of  examination  thou 
shalt  be  saved." 

You  find  those  to  whom  the  truth  is  always 
a  tool,  the  use  of  which  is  to  be  mastered.  It 
can  be  set  to  dig  or  to  build,  to  heal  or  to 
plead,  to  instruct  or  co  preach,  and  thus  made 
to  yield  a  financial  return.  "Here  is  the 
truth,''  they  say,  "master  the  use  of  it  and  it 
will  put  money  in  thy  purse." 

You  find  those  to  whom  the  truth  is  always 
a  picture  to  be  framed  and  hung  up  for  the 
admiration  of  beholders.  "Here  is  the 
truth,"  they  say,  "learn  to  enjoy  it  as  a  man 
of  culture  and  thou  shalt  be  numbered  with 
the  elite." 

The  abstract,  the  commercial,  and  the 
decorative  idea  of  knowledge,  each  one  takes 
its  turn  at  the  bat ;  each  one  has  its  way  with 
us  at  some  period  of  our  development;  and 
each  one  fails  to  score  when  the  game  is 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE 


finally  reckoned  up  because  each  one  deals 
only  with  that  which  is  secondary. 

The  primary  office  of  knowledge  is  to 
make  men  alive.  It  is  designed  to  send  them 
out  alive  at  more  points,  alive  on  higher  lev- 
els, alive  in  more  effective  ways.  The  highest 
reward  for  gaining  an  education  comes  not 
in  the  sense  of  having  more  information  on  a 
certain  subject  than  your  neighbors  possess ; 
it  comes  not  in  the  fact  that  now  you  can  go 
into  the  market  and  sell  your  efforts  at  a 
higher  figure  than  uneducated  persons  can 
do;  it  comes  not  in  the  privileged  possession 
of  that  subtle  and  altogether  admirable  some- 
thing we  call  culture.  The  highest  reward 
comes  in  an  enlarged  capacity  to  live.  If 
your  college  course  makes  you  as  a  person 
destined  to  live  with  other  persons  more 
thoroughly,  abundantly,  and  usefully  alive, 
it  has  done  its  work.  This  is  primary,  be- 
cause the  ultimate  value  of  knowledge  lies  in 
its  power  to  minister  to  life. 

I  can  best  illustrate  this  in  a  concrete  case. 
During  the  last  six  months  we  have  been 
reading  a  great  deal  in  the  papers  and  maga- 
zines about  a  man  whose  name  was  William 
James.    He  is  dead,  to  our  great  sorrow,  for 


6        THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

he  was  Professor  of  Philosophy  in  Harvard 
University,  and  he  was  a  philosopher  in  a 
thousand.  He  merited  all  that  has  been  said 
about  him.  He  was  a  standing  rebuke  to  the 
definition  given  of  metaphysics  by  a  certain 
wag.  I  do  not  quote  the  remark  approvingly 
and  would  not  venture  to  quote  it  at  all  were 
I  not  a  lover  of  philosophy  myself,  having 
invested  much  time  in  hard  and  rewarding 
study  along  that  line.  ''When  some  man 
talks  about  what  he  does  not  understand,'' 
the  wag  said,  ''to  a  lot  of  people  who  do  not 
understand  him,  about  something  that  would 
not  make  a  particle  of  difference  to  any  of 
them  if  they  did  understand  it,  that  is  meta- 
physics.'' It  indicates  in  a  rough  way  a  cer- 
tain popular,  though  mistaken  attitude  to- 
ward certain  brands  of  philosophy. 

William  James  was  an  effective  reply  to 
that  w^hole  line  of  criticism.  He  always 
knew  what  he  was  talking  about.  He  used 
the  English  language  in  such  a  way,  wath 
such  charm  and  clearness,  that  other  people 
understood  him.  And  what  he  said  did  make 
a  difference.  He  used  to  say  with  the  great- 
est emphasis,  "There  is  no  difference  worth 
discussing  which  does  not  make  a  difference 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE 


in  conduct,"— that  is  to  say,  in  life.  He  gave 
much  of  his  best  strength  latterly  to  what 
is  called  "pragmatism,''  and  the  word  prag- 
matism is  simply  a  technical  term  to  indicate 
that  the  "truth  works''  and  finds  its  main 
justification,  perhaps,  in  the  fact  that  it  does 
work  and  that  in  the  great  outcome  it  is  the 
only  thing  that  will  work.  The  honored 
Harvard  professor  was  forever  striving  to 
bring  his  philosophy  into  immediate  contact 
with  life  and  thus  compel  it  to  assert  its  value 
in  terms  of  improved  experience.  The  pri- 
mary thing  with  him  was  the  direct  bearing 
of  truth  on  life. 

Now  all  this  applies  with  special  force  to 
religious  truth.  Religion  has  come  that  we 
might  have  life  and  that  we  might  have  it 
more  abundantly.  He  that  hath  religion  hath 
life  on  wider  areas  and  on  higher  levels.  He 
that  hath  not  religion  hath  not  life.  The 
final  word  of  religion  in  the  best  known  and 
most  popular  of  all  the  parables,  the  parable 
of  the  good  Samaritan,  was,  "This  do  and 
thou  shalt  live."  The  sublime  reaction  from 
the  attempt  to  love  God  with  all  the  heart 
and  one's  neighbor  as  well  as  one's  self, 
would  be  found,  the  Author  of  the  parable 


8        THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

said,  in  an  increased  power  to  live.  The  ulti- 
mate value  of  religious  truth  lies  in  its  power 
to  minister  to  life. 

We  wonder  sometimes  why  the  term  "ec- 
clesiasticar'  and  the  term  "academic"  are 
uttered  nine  times  out  of  ten  as  terms  of 
reproach.  "He  is  merely  an  ecclesiastic," 
men  say,  as  if  that  disposed  of  him.  "His 
knowledge  of  the  subject  is  purely  aca- 
demic," they  say,  as  if  that  were  sufficient 
reason  for  not  entering  his  name  in  the  trial 
balance,  — it  would  not  affect  the  result.  The 
church  and  the  school  are  respectable  institu- 
tions yet  "ecclesiastical"  and  "academic"  are 
commonly  terms  of  reproach.  May  it  not  be 
for  the  reason  that  what  we  sometimes  teach 
from  the  pulpit  or  from  the  chair  does  so 
often  fail  to  relate  itself  in  helpful  fashion 
to  life  that,  in  consequence,  the  big  outside 
world  where  things  are  done  has  fallen  into 
a  way  of  stamping  much  of  our  output  as 
dry  and  fruitless  ? 

There  was  once  a  great  Teacher  who  has 
come  by  common  consent  to  be  widely  called 
"The  Master."  His  work  was  a  full-page, 
life-size  illustration  of  the  direct  bearing  of 
truth  upon  life.    He  gave  His  first  lecture  in 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE 


a  little  synagogue  at  Nazareth.  He  then 
appeared  in  the  larger  temple  at  Jerusalem. 
He  then  went  out  of  doors  and  stood  on  the 
hillside  under  the  open  sky.  From  the  record 
it  would  seem  that  four-fifths  of  all  His 
work  was  done  in  the  open  air.  He  went 
there  hecause  the  people  were  there,  the  great 
main  movements  of  life  were  there,  the  vital 
concerns  of  ordinary  existence  were  there, 
and  He  was  intent  upon  relating  His  truth  to 
the  common  life.  He  was  unwilling  to  re- 
main apart  with  a  little,  inner,  select  circle, 
allowing  the  great,  main,  secular  interests  of 
the  world  go  their  way  untaught,  unre- 
newed, and  unblessed  by  the  truths  of  the 
religion  He  came  to  establish. 

The  sentence  which  precedes  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  is  quite  as  significant  as  any 
sentence  contained  in  the  address  itself. 
"Seeing  the  multitudes.  He  went  up  into  a 
mountain  and  opened  His  mouth  and  taught 
them."  That  is  to  say.  His  teaching  was 
called  out  by  the  immediate  appeal  of  life. 

It  was  the  sight  of  that  multitude,  not 
merely  so  many  square  rods  of  human  beings 
such  as  one  might  see  gathered  together  on 
the  Fourth  of  July  or  on  Labor  Day,  but  that 


lo      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

array  of  hopes  and  fears,  of  yearnings  and 
longings,  of  sorrows  and  sins,  — it  was  that 
mass  of  human  need  which  kindled  the  heart 
and  loosened  the  tongue  of  this  Teacher  pos- 
sessed of  sympathetic  insight.  Seeing  the 
multitudes  and  thinking  of  all  that  was  hid- 
den away  in  those  many  hearts,  recognizing 
the  undeclared  and  unrealized  capacity  in 
waiting  deep  down  in  the  lives  of  all  those 
people.  He  was  moved  to  speak.  He  went  up 
on  the  hillside  and  taught  them.  His  message 
was  called  out  directly  by  the  appeal  of  life. 
More  than  that,  when  you  come  to  read  it 
you  find  that  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  not 
a  history  of  religion,  nor  a  philosophy  of 
religion,  nor  a  rigid  system  of  dogma.  It 
shows  in  every  line  of  it  that  it  took  shape 
and  form  in  the  immediate  presence  of  life. 
His  every  word  bore  directly  on  some  neces- 
sary problem  of  human  life.  He  addressed 
Himself  to  the  needs  of  those  who  hungered 
after  righteousness,  who  wanted  to  obtain 
mercy,  who  wished  to  stand  in  right  relations 
with  their  fellows,  who  longed  to  know  the 
truth  about  prayer  and  eternal  life,  who 
desired  that  they  might  see  God.  It  may  be 
that  this  is  the  reason  why  He  is  called  "The 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  ii 

Master/'— among  all  the  instructors  of  the 
race  He  stands  at  the  head  of  the  list  in 
relatinc;'  truth  to  life. 

What  a  tremendous  difference  it  would 
have  made  in  human  progress  if  all  the  great 
religious  pronouncements  had  been  thus 
wrought  out  in  the  immediate  presence  of 
life!  For  example,  when  the  Athanasian 
Creed  was  shaped  up  no  one  was  present  ex- 
cept a  company  of  learned,  dry-as-dust  theo- 
logians. If  they  had  enjoyed  the  presence 
and  the  counsel  of  a  half  dozen  clear-headed 
business  men,  or  a  few  bright  women  with 
their  keener  intuitions,  that  celebrated  Creed 
might  not  have  been  quite  so  repellent. 

When  the  Westminster  Confession  of 
Faith  was  framed,  the  work  was  done  by  a 
body  of  mature  men  shut  up  for  five  years 
within  the  walls  of  Westminster  Abbey.  It 
is  no  milk-and-water  affair.  It  undertakes 
to  be  the  most  logical,  fundamental,  and  ex- 
plicit setting  forth  of  man's  relations  to  his 
Maker  anywhere  contained  in  the  great 
creedal  statements  of  Christendom.  The  men 
who  made  it  were  wise  and  learned  and 
godly,— -there  is  no  manner  of  doubt  about 
that.    But  when  you  read  their  utterance  in 


12      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

the  famous  old  Confession  it  does  not  seem 
like  an  instrument  framed  up  in  the  presence 
of  the  real  needs  of  the  human  heart. 

If  a  multitude  had  been  present  on  that 
occasion  also,  if  some  little  children  even  had 
been  playing  over  at  one  side  or  looking  up 
timidly  into  the  faces  of  their  mothers,  some- 
what frightened  by  the  sight  of  so  much 
theological  learning,  that  section  about  the 
damnation  of  non-elect  infants  might  never 
have  gotten  in.  If  a  half  dozen  boys  had 
been  somewhere  in  sight  with  the  bubble,  the 
promise,  and  the  mystery  of  healthy  youth, 
those  dear  old  men  would  have  limbered  up 
some  of  the  joints  of  the  Confession  in  spite 
of  themselves.  It  was  a  creed  wrought  out, 
it  would  seem,  to  satisfy  the  demands  of 
logic  or  to  match  an  imposing  array  of  skill- 
fully selected  proof  texts,  or  to  express  their 
own  metaphysical  broodings.  It  was  not 
framed  up  to  face  and  to  meet  the  normal 
and  constantly  recurring  needs  of  life,  and 
that  is  its  condemnation. 

I  have  taken  this  illustration  from  my  own 
particular  line  of  study  because  I  am  more 
familiar  with  that,  but  the  same  principle 
holds  on  many  other  fields.     The  truth  as 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  13 

some  man  teaches  it  in  the  University  and  as 
some  students  study  it  may  be  kilHngly  cor- 
rect viewed  in  the  abstract,  or  it  may  be  well 
calculated  to  be  a  genuine  commercial  asset 
in  the  increased  earning  capacity  of  the  man 
who  masters  it,  or  it  may  be  as  beautiful  to 
look  at  as  a  painting  by  Turner ;  but  it  does 
not  stand  related  in  any  creative  fashion  to 
the  finer,  the  deeper,  and  the  more  enduring 
interests  of  life.  No  master  in  Israel  has 
ever  carried  it  out  into  the  presence  of  the 
multitude  and  shown  its  bearings  in  such  a 
way  as  to  merit  the  high  endorsement,  "This 
know  and  thou  shalt  live'';  and  that  is  the 
condemnation  of  any  such  method. 

^'Knowledge  is  power,''  but  only  when  it  is 
knowledge  in  process  of  being  wrought  out 
in  terms  of  life.  Men  differ  widely  in  the 
amount  of  information  they  carry  about  with 
them,— that  is  altogether  secondary,  for  the 
information  is  all  there  in  the  encyclopedia 
when  we  want  it,  and  mere  information  is 
not  power.  Men  differ  widely  in  the  amount 
of  technical  training  they  have  received, — 
this  has  value,  but  it  may  miss  the  thing  that 
is  vital;  it  often  does  miss  it.  Real  knowl- 
edge belongs  rather  to  the  man  trained  in 


14      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

sympathetic  insight,  in  real  grasp  and  in  the 
habit  of  concentration.  Put  such  a  man 
down  anywhere  with  a  book  or  a  problem, 
with  a  piece  of  machinery  or  a  difficult  situa- 
tion in  business,  with  some  exacting  task  in 
the  work  of  education,  or  with  some  hard 
moral  struggle,  and  he  will  know  what  to  do 
with  it.  He  may  or  may  not  be  up  in  that 
particular  line,  but  his  trained  and  knowing 
mind  will  give  him  capacity  for  accomplish- 
ment. He  will  intelligently  set  about  the 
mastery  of  that  particular  job.  His  whole 
habit  of  steadily  relating  truth  to  life,  which 
has  become  ingrained,  will  make  him  com- 
petent to  do,  to  be,  and  to  grow. 

It  was  never  meant  that  truth  and  life 
should  dwell  apart,  no,  not  for  an  hour.  The 
Almighty  at  the  outset  joined  them  together. 
The  Master  of  all  the  higher  values  uttered 
His  confirmation  of  this  principle  when  He 
said,  "The  words  that  I  speak  unto  you,  they 
are  spirit  and  they  are  life."  *'What  God 
hath  joined  together  let  no  man  put  asun- 
der." 

Some  of  the  later  Greek  philosophers  were 
wont  to  speak  scornfully  of  the  untaught, 
unwashed  herd.    ''What  could  they  make  of 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  15 

Plato's  'Republic/  or  of  Aristotle's  Trolego- 
mena  to  Ethics'?"  they  said.  They  insisted 
that  philosophy  was  for  the  select  few.  It 
was  this  separation  of  sublime  truths  from 
the  interests  of  common  life  which  made 
such  men  "academic." 

Many  of  the  Hindoo  teachers  seek  only  to 
make  a  few  select  adepts,  Brahmins  of  high 
caste,  who  may  be  able  to  appreciate  their 
subtle  notions.  "This  truth  of  ours  is  not  for 
the  many,"  they  say.  And  this  serves  to  ac- 
count for  the  wide  remove  between  the 
quality  of  India's  ability  along  the  line  of 
philosophical  and  religious  speculation  and 
the  measure  of  her  ability  to  live  the  life  of 
genuine  aspiration  and  useful  service. 

The  scribes  and  Pharisees  in  Christ's  day 
when  they  saw  the  common  people  following 
Him  eagerly  and  hearing  Him  gladly, 
sneered.  "Have  any  of  the  rulers  believed 
on  Him?  This  people  that  knoweth  not  the 
law  are  accursed."  This  was  simply  a  round- 
about and  theological  way  of  saying,  "The 
common  people  be accursed !" 

Here  in  our  own  land,  some  college  gradu- 
ate, he  may  be  a  clergyman  or  a  professor, 
or  he  may  follow  any  one  of  a  dozen  voca- 


i6      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

tions,  goes  forth  perhaps  and  talks  learnedly 
about  that  which  has  no  particular  relation  to 
the  lives  of  his  fellows,  using  all  the  technical 
patois  of  his  own  department,  throwing  in 
great  quantities  of  Latin  and  Greek  deriva- 
tives, and  then  because  the  people  fail  to  get 
anything  out  of  it,  he  decides  that  "It  is  too 
deep  for  them/'  And  the  people  go  away 
wondering  why  learned  men  are  often  so 
deadly  dull.  The  fault  is  in  the  man  in  that 
he  has  not  learned  the  high  art  of  relating 
truth  to  life. 

The  really  and  truly  great  things,  standing 
in  the  very  first  rank,  not  in  the  second  or 
third,  are  meant  to  win  their  response  from 
the  many.  The  beauty  of  a  rainbow  or  a 
sunset,  the  grandeur  of  the  ocean  in  a  storm, 
or  the  quiet  peace  of  some  lovely  valley,  the 
trees,  the  flowers,  and  the  singing  birds,  all 
these  see  the  multitudes  as  Christ  did  and 
win  their  response.  The  cathedral  at  Co- 
logne and  the  Sistine  Madonna,  the  oratorio 
of  "The  Messiah,"  and  the  overture  to 
"Tannhauser,"  these  are  not  for  the  initiated 
alone ;  they  too  are  enjoyed  by  the  multitudes. 
It  is  a  misguided  mind  which  hides  what  it 
has  of  genuine  worth  under  a  bushel  of  tech- 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  17 

nique  and  then  foolishly  believes  that  it  is  too 
great  for  the  world  to  be  able  to  receive  it. 
The  lack  is  in  the  man  who  has  not  found  a 
suitable  channel  of  expression.  Rightly  ut- 
tered, the  best  that  any  department  of  human 
learning  has  may  win  its  response  from  the 
many  by  relating  itself  in  some  helpful 
fashion  to  the  inner  life. 

Jesus  set  His  face  squarely  against  the 
notion  that  religion  as  He  taught  it,  was  a 
subtle,  esoteric,  mysterious  something  to  be 
appreciated  only  by  the  chosen  few.  'Tf  any 
man,"— cultured  and  trained  he  may  be,  or 
rude  and  unlettered,  — ''will  do  the  will,  he 
shall  know  the  doctrine.''  His  life  of  trust- 
ful obedience  will  increase  his  spiritual  in- 
sight and  render  him  competent  to  make 
voyages  of  spiritual  discovery  in  his  own 
right. 

"If  any  man  thirst,"— any  man,  whatever 
his  history  or  particular  attainments,  — ''let 
him  come  unto  Me  and  drink."  However 
great  or  meager  his  individual  talent  may  be, 
if  he  is  genuinely  athirst  for  a  higher  life,  let 
him  come.  He  may,  he  can,  take  the  water 
of  life  freely. 

Jesus  made  special  and  winsome  appeal  to 


i8       THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

those  who  might  feel  themselves  omitted 
from  the  privileges  of  religion  at  its  best. 
The  stress  of  their  physical  toil  and  the 
dwarfing  effect  of  severe  drudgery  might 
seem  to  have  dulled  their  spiritual  capacity. 
But  Christ  said,  "Come  unto  Me  all  ye  that 
labor  and  are  heavy  laden.  Take  My  yoke 
upon  you  and  learn."  If  they  would  enlist 
openly  in  His  service,  they  would  inevitably 
find  rest  unto  their  souls.  It  was  always  His 
way.  His  word  was  a  universal  word.  The 
sight  of  the  multitude  moved  Him  to  utter 
His  best  because  His  truth  was  meant  for  the 
common  life. 

I  have  dwelt  upon  this  at  some  length  be- 
cause many  people  have  fallen  into  the  way 
of  keeping  certain  religious  convictions  apart 
in  a  kind  of  safe  deposit  vault  where  things 
too  valuable  for  everyday  use  are  commonly 
stored.  They  know  that  these  sacred  con- 
victions are  there.  They  go  in  on  state  occa- 
sions, Christmas  and  Easter,  perhaps,  and 
look  at  them.  They  feel  a  bit  richer  because 
they  have  such  beliefs  and  sentiments  locked 
up  in  that  place  of  security.  But  they  have 
no  idea  of  bringing  those  religious  judg- 
ments out  in  the  broad  glare  of  day  or  of  set- 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  19 


ting  them  to  work  on  the  field  of  ordinary 
action.    What  a  stupid  waste  of  privilege ! 

What  difference  does  it  make  whether  you 
believe  or  fail  to  believe  in  anything  unless  it 
affects  your  life?  What  difference  does  it 
make  whether  you  regard  the  story  of  Jonah 
as  history  or  as  parable  unless  your  position 
in  the  matter  affects  your  life  ?  What  differ- 
ence does  it  make  whether  you  regard  the 
story  of  Joshua  calling  upon  the  sun  to  stand 
still  as  prose  or  as  poetry,  the  hard  statement 
of  historic  fact,  or  a  beautiful  reference  to 
the  idea  that  the  significant  events  of  that 
memorable  day  seemed  to  stretch  it  far 
beyond  the  limited  number  of  hours  assigned 
to  it  in  the  almanac  ? 

Or,  turning  from  things  trivial  to  things 
vital,  what  difference  does  it  make  whether 
you  believe  or  refuse  to  believe  in  the  author- 
ity and  inspiration  of  the  Bible,  in  the  unique 
character  and  person  of  Jesus  Christ,  unless 
the  position  you  have  come  to  hold  issues  in 
an  altered  and  improved  attitude  of  Hfe?  It 
is  the  same  contention  made  by  the  professor 
of  philosophy.  There  is  no  difference  worth 
discussing  which  does  not  make  a  difference 
in  life.     The  chief  reason  why  it  is  worth 


20      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

while  to  study  and  to  strive  for  carefully  con- 
sidered, well-grounded,  strongly  held  convic- 
tions as  to  religious  truth  is  that  they  do  have 
a  direct  and  powerful  bearing  upon  life. 
Men  are  actually  transformed  by  the  renew- 
ing of  their  minds. 

We  are  sometimes  taunted  with  the  fact 
that  our  religious  faith  in  some  of  its  claims 
cannot  be  demonstrated.  Our  faith  in  a  di- 
vine Providence  where  all  things  work  to- 
gether for  good  to  those  who  are  faced  right ; 
our  faith  in  the  ultimate  and  transcendent 
effects  of  prayer;  our  faith  in  immortality — 
no  one  of  these  claims,  it  is  said,  can  be  sub- 
mitted to  the  test  of  immediate  and  final 
demonstration  and  thus  proved  beyond  a 
peradventure  to  all  beholders.  We  cannot 
go  to  the  blackboard  and  demonstrate  the 
truth  of  the  Christian  position  in  any  one  of 
these  matters  as  we  might  prove  some  propo- 
sition in  mathematics.  We  cannot  enter  the 
physical  laboratory  and  establish  the  truth  of 
these  claims  as  we  might  demonstrate  certain 
chemical  reactions. 

The  objection  is  sound.  But  neither  can 
unbelief  at  these  points  be  submitted  to  im- 
mediate and  final  demonstration.    The  unbe- 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  21 


lievers  also  are  walking  by  faith  and  not  by 
sight,  albeit  their  faith  is  a  negative  faith. 
They  are  not  opposing  our  faith  with  their 
knowledge,  but  simply  with  a  negative  form 
of  belief  which  they  have  chosen  to  accept. 

The  beauty  of  our  faith  is  that  it  can  be 
successfully  lived.     It  works,  and  it  works 
better  than  anything  else  offered.     Life  be- 
comes  more   livable,   more   inspiring,   more 
effective  when  it  is  caught  and  held  in  the 
grip  of  a  great  confidence  in  an  all-embrac- 
ing Providence  which  is  steadily  serving  the 
higher  interests  of  the  race  and  will  ulti- 
mately vindicate  its  course  at  the  bar  of 
reason  and  conscience.     Life  is  more  livable 
and  more  enjoyable  when  we  believe  that  we 
have  power  to  enter  into  the  shaping  of  the 
more  important  spiritual  events  of  the  uni- 
verse through  faithful  and  persistent  prayer. 
Life  is  more  livable  when  we  live  it  by  the 
power  of  our  confidence  in  an  endless  life. 
Our  faith  can  be  lived,  and  when  it  is  thus 
carried  into  the  presence  of  the  multitude 
and  applied  to  the  fundamental  interests  of 
Hfe,  it  works. 

It  is  exceedingly  important  that  those  who 
are  to  give  the  best  strength  of  their  lives  to 


^2      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

the  work  of  teaching,  should  feel  that  they 
are  standing  on  firm  ground  at  this  point. 
When  Bronson  Alcott,  the  Boston  transcen- 
dentalist,  was  living  in  the  town  of  Concord, 
he  strolled  one  day  into  the  village  school. 
According  to  the  custom  then  prevailing  in 
country  districts,  he  was  asked  to  make  some 
remarks.  He  stood  up,  looking  at  the  chil- 
dren inquiringly  with  that  genuine  interest 
he  felt  in  whatever  was  human— and  I  sup- 
pose the  average  schoolroom  yields  about  as 
many  bushels  to  the  acre  of  pure  unadul- 
terated human  nature  as  any  field  to  be 
found.  The  children  were  also  eyeing  him, 
wondering  what  he  was  going  to  say,  and 
presently  beginning  to  wonder  if  he  intended 
to  say  anything.  Suddenly  he  burst  out, 
"What  did  you  come  here  for?"  The  boys 
and  girls  exchanged  looks  of  surprise,  whis- 
pered and  giggled  a  little,  and  then  the  an- 
swer came  back  from  one  of  the  bolder 
spirits,  — "We  came  to  learn."  "To  learn 
what?"  the  philosopher  asked.  Again  they 
pondered,  and  reflected  upon  those  particular 
aspects  of  pedagogical  experience  which  had 
impressed  them  most,  and  the  answer  came 
back,  "To  learn  to  behave." 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  23 


Out  of  the  mouths  of  babes  and  urchins, 
you  know,  out  of  those  simple,  fearless,  child- 
like minds  which  say  just  what  they  think, 
the  world  adds  to  its  stock  of  truth.  Going 
to  school,  and  the  whole  pursuit  of  knowl- 
edge for  which  the  schoolroom  stands,  has 
several  ends  in  view,  but  the  one  central  and 
controlling  principle  in  it  all  is  "to  learn  to 
behave." 

By  that  I  do  not  mean  the  transformation 
of  the  ordinary  school  exercise  into  a  kind  of 
preaching  service.  I  do  not  mean  the  intro- 
duction of  even  so  much  of  the  spirit  of  sec- 
tarian propagandism  as  might  creep  through 
the  crack  under  the  door.  I  mean  that  the 
everyday  business  of  teaching  children  to 
read  and  write  and  add  up  columns  of  fig- 
ures ;  I  mean  that  the  task  of  teaching  them 
history,  literature,  geography,  and  science 
should  be  held  firmly  within  the  grasp  of  a 
definite  moral  purpose.  The  end  in  view  in 
our  whole  pursuit  and  disbursement  of  learn- 
ing is  to  send  out  men  and  women  better 
equipped  to  behave  wisely,  honestly,  and  use- 
fully. The  high  task  of  education  carried  on 
in  the  schoolroom,  or  in  the  college,  or  in  that 
larger  university  outside  where  term  time  is 


24      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

all  the  time,  is  to  translate  and  transmute 
truth  into  life  so  that  people  may  behave 
well. 

In  that  address  Jesus  gave  to  the  multitude, 
it  is  significant  that  the  first  word  uttered 
was  not  a  word  of  reproach,  ignorant  and 
faulty  though  the  people  were  for  the  most 
part.  It  was  not  a  word  of  duty,  much  as 
they  needed  instruction  on  that  point.  It  was 
a  word  of  high  privilege;  it  was  the  word 
"blessed,''  or  as  we  translate  it  now  more 
accurately,  the  word  ''happy."  The  whole 
world  was  seeking  happiness  and  Christ  took 
hold  of  that  universal  desire  in  His  first 
word.  He  honored  that  desire  for  happiness 
by  striking  that  keynote  in  the  first  sentence 
of  His  Charter  Day  address.  He  then  pro- 
ceeded to  direct  the  minds  of  the  people  to 
those  sources  where  real  and  permanent  hap- 
piness would  be  found.  It  did  not  spring. 
He  said,  so  much  from  possessions  or 
achievements  as  from  a  certain  inner  quality 
of  life.  He  did  not  say,  "Happy  are  the 
rich,"  or,  "Happy  are  the  successful."  He 
said  rather,  "Happy  are  the  gentle,  the 
merciful,  the  aspiring,  the  pure  hearted. 
Happy  are  they  that  hunger  and  thirst  after 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  25 

righteousness,  who  go  about  making  peace." 
He  bade  men,  therefore,  seek  first  a  certain 
disposition  toward  God  and  toward  their  fel- 
lows if  they  would  find  happiness. 

We  spend  so  much  time  and  strength  in 
changing  and  improving  the  tools  and  the 
general  machinery  of  life  and  then  forget 
oftentimes  to  change  and  improve  those  who 
are  to  operate  the  machine.  If  we  should 
take  the  sickle  Ruth  used  when  she  gleaned 
after  the  reapers  in  the  fields  of  Boaz,  and 
lay  it  down  beside  one  of  those  combined 
harvesters  and  threshers  used  in  California 
and  in  the  grain  fields  of  the  northwest,  we 
might  feel  that  we  had  made  tremendous 
progress.  But  if  we  should  take  Ruth  her- 
self and  place  her  beside  the  wives  and 
daughters  of  the  men  who  make  those  har- 
vesters in  the  factories  and  operate  them  in 
the  fields,  it  might  seem  that  our  progress  in 
the  more  important  line  of  manufacturing 
human  values  was  not  a  thing  to  be  cele- 
brated with  international  expositions.  All 
the  outside  things  are  the  tools  and  ma- 
chinery of  life,  and  they  are  secondary.  That 
which  alone  is  primary  is  the  quality  and 
disposition  of  the  life  within. 


26      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

In  one  of  his  little  books  Henry  Van  Dyke 
refers  to  three  ideals  in  education :  the  deco- 
rative, the  marketable,  and  the  creative.  The 
man  with  the  first  thinks  it  is  a  fine  thing  to 
go  to  college.  It  gives  one  an  air  of  dis- 
tinction. It  enables  him  to  belong  to  the 
University  Club  in  the  city  where  he  lives. 
It  enables  him  to  refer  to  "my  class"  and  to 
"the  good  old  days"  at  Columbia  or  Prince- 
ton, at  Harvard  or  Yale,  at  Stanford  or 
California.  He  may  even  register  himself  in 
his  own  mind  as  a  "dig"  and  go  in  for  a  Phi 
Beta  Kappa  Key,  with  the  idea  that  it  will 
unlock  doors  closed  to  other  men.  And  be- 
cause he  is  a  university  man  and  a  graduate 
he  feels  that  he  possesses  a  rare  and  culti- 
vated taste  in  music  and  art,  in  literature  and 
philosophy.  He  thinks  of  his  education  as  a 
highly  decorative  appendage  to  his  own  life. 

The  second  man  has  no  use  for  all  this. 
Privately,  he  looks  upon  the  decorative  fel- 
low as  a  cultivated  freak.  He  himself  is 
thoroughly  practical.  He  has  his  mind  on 
the  main  chance.  He  is  one  of  those  "no 
nonsense  about  me"  men.  He  selects  his  col- 
lege and  chooses  his  courses  with  one  eye  on 
the  catalogue  and  the  other  eye  on  the  cash 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  2.-] 


book  he  expects  to  keep  by  and  by.  He  thinks 
of  himself  as  a  tool  to  be  ground  and  sharp- 
ened so  it  will  cut  where  other  tools  fail.  He 
is  very  contemptuous  in  his  attitude  toward 
the  study  of  dead  languages  or  of  philosophy. 
"What  good  will  all  that  do  me  when  I  get 
out  into  the  world  of  business?''  He  means, 
what  good  will  it  do  his  bank  account,  for  he 
still  thinks  that  a  man's  life  consisteth  in  the 
abundance  of  the  things  that  he  possesseth, 
a  certain  eminent  authority  to  the  contrary 
notwithstanding.  He  wants  an  education, 
not  for  the  purpose  of  living,  but  for  the  pur- 
pose of  making  a  living,  which  is  a  very  dif- 
ferent matter.  He  has  the  marketable  idea 
of  education. 

If  any  of  you  should  stop  on  either  of  those 
two  rounds  of  the  ladder,  your  professors 
here  would  be  ashamed  of  you.  The  found- 
ers of  this  noble  university,  in  such  event, 
would  feel  that  you  had  disgraced  it.  H  you 
allow  your  pupils  to  fail  to  recognize  the  real 
bearing  of  truth  upon  life,  you  ought  to  be 
cast  out  of  the  synagogue  of  learning. 

The  only  adequate  ideal  in  education  is  the 
creative  ideal.  This  do,  this  know,  and  thou 
shalt  live !  The  reward  for  reading  books  lies 


28      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

not  in  the  information  gained  or  in  the  ideas 
acquired,  but  in  the  mental  stimulus  afforded, 
in  the  power  we  gain  to  read  more  books  and 
better  ones  and,  by  and  by,  to  think  for  our- 
selves and  produce  ideas  of  our  own.  The 
reward  for  doing  your  duty  lies  in  the  power 
you  gain  to  keep  on  doing  it  and  to  do  it  bet- 
ter. The  reward  for  meeting  and  mastering 
any  hard  situation  in  life  lies  in  the  power 
acquired  to  meet  and  master  other  still 
harder  situations,  and  to  aid  your  fellows  in 
that  same  high  task  by  your  sympathetic  in- 
sight and  useful  experience.  The  creative 
ideal  of  education,  the  perpetual  ministry  of 
truth  to  life,  is  the  only  one  which  proves 
satisfactory. 

And  to  go  one  step  further,  it  is  that  truth 
which  has  been  wrought  into  life  and  finds 
there  habitual  expression,  which  becomes 
effective  in  the  teacher  of  youth  or  in  the 
preacher  of  righteousness,  or  in  the  service 
rendered  by  any  one  to  the  deeper  needs  of 
his  fellows. 

When  St.  Francis  of  Assisi  established  the 
order  which  bears  his  name,  a  young  man, 
who  thought  quite  as  highly  of  himself  as  he 
ought  to  have  thought,  came  and  joined. 


TRUTH  AND  LIFE  29 

The  youth  was  eager  to  become  a  famous 
preacher,  and  the  simple  lessons  assigned  to 
him  in  the  monastery  and  the  somewhat 
lowly  duties  imposed  upon  him  were  most 
trying  to  his  patience.  But  one  day  St. 
Francis  came  to  the  young  man  and  said, 
"My  son,  let  us  go  down  into  the  village  and 
preach.*'  The  invitation  was  accepted  with 
great  alacrity,  for  the  young  man  was  fairly 
bursting  with  religious  eloquence  which  he 
longed  to  pour  out  upon  the  people. 

The  two  men  went  down  into  the  village. 
They  passed  the  time  of  day  with  a  few  ac- 
quaintances and  neighbors  as  they  met  them 
on  the  street.  They  stopped  at  the  market- 
place and  made  some  purchases  for  the 
monastery,  chatting  in  friendly  fashion  with 
the  market  men.  They  made  a  few  brief  calls 
on  some  families  where  sorrow  or  sickness 
had  come.  They  spoke  to  a  tradesman  about 
employment  for  a  promising  boy  who  lived 
near  the  monastery.  By  and  by,  when  they 
had  discharged  these  and  other  similar 
errands,  all  of  them  utterly  devoid  of  any 
interest  to  the  young  orator,  the  good  St. 
Francis  turned  his  face  toward  home. 

"But,  my  father,"  the  young  man  cried  in 


so      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

dismay,  "when  are  we  going  to  preach?" 
"My  son/'  repHed  St.  Francis,  "we  have  been 
preaching  all  the  time."  The  truth  wrought 
out  in  terms  of  life  and  finding  expression  in 
those  simple,  ordinary  relations  and  occupa- 
tions which  make  up  the  bulk  of  our  human 
experience,  investing  them  with  new  mean- 
ing and  giving  them  a  finer  quality,  becomes 
the  highest  form  of  message  which  men  ever 
receive. 

The  word  made  flesh,  dwelling  among  men 
in  simple,  homely  fashion,  full  of  grace  and 
truth,  is  ever  the  word  which  has  power.  The 
truth  which  has  become  flesh,  muscles,  nerves, 
vitality,  competent  to  serve  the  needs  of 
others  with  grace,  is  ever  the  effective  instru- 
ment in  all  useful  ministry. 

Religion  shorn  of  all  those  accidents  which 
sometimes  fasten  upon  it  has  been  defined  as 
"personal  devotion  to  the  will  of  God  as  it 
stands  revealed  in  Jesus  Christ,  finding  ex- 
pression for  its  aspiration  in  worship  and  for 
its  sense  of  obligation  in  obedient  service." 
And,  viewed  after  this  vital  fashion,  it  is  im- 
possible for  any  one  to  come  to  his  own 
highest  self-realization  or  to  meet  fully  his 


TRUTH   AND  LIFE  31 


responsibility  to  the  generation  in  which  he        j 
Hves,  without  reHgion.  i 

Personal  religion  lifts  a  man  out  of  the 
pettiness  and  isolation  of  his  own  little  pri- 
vate efforts  into  the  sense  of  participation  in        ; 
an  august  moral  enterprise.    It  lifts  him  into        ' 
the  sense  of  fellowship  with  an  Infinite  Being        : 
in  His  resistless  advance  toward  a  superb  f  ul-        : 
fillment.    It  enables  the  religious  man  to  say        ■ 
at  every  step  of  the  way,  "I  am  not  alone,  the       | 
Father  is  with  me."    And  each  man's  beliefs 
and  purposes,  his  habits  of  action  and  his       j 
ultimate  aspirations  should  be  made  adequate       | 
to  grasp  and  to  retain  this  splendid  form  of       5 
experience. 


II 

THE  WORTH  OF  INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE^ 

IN  the  last  lecture  I  sought  to  indicate  that 
the  main  office  of  truth  is  to  minister  to 
life ;  and  that  truth  wrought  out  in  terms  of 
life  and  finding  habitual  expression  in  those 
activities  which  make  up  the  bulk  of  our  ex- 
perience, is  the  truth  which  becomes  most  ef- 
fective in  serving  human  need. 

But  the  moment  we  begin  to  deal  with  re- 
ligious truth  we  are  made  aware  of  the  incom- 
pleteness of  our  knowledge.  We  are  not  in 
the  realm  of  finality  as  we  might  be  in  pure 
mathematics  or  in  formal  logic.  Our  knowl- 
edge is  limited  and  when  we  begin  to  push 
out  along  those  lines  of  inquiry  which  seem 
to  invite  our  advance,  we  find  that  knowledge 
speedily  impinging  upon  a  great  world  where 

lA  portion  of  the  material  in  this  chapter  appeared  in  my 
little  book  "The  Cap  and  Gown,"  published  by  Pilgrim 
Press,  Boston,  and  is  here  utilized  by  their  kind  permission. 

32 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  33 

we  do  not  know.  We  are  broug-ht  face  to 
face  with  an  undiscovered  country  not 
mapped  out  as  yet  and  apparently  incapable 
at  present  of  being  accurately  surveyed.  We 
repeat  the  experience  of  those  men  of  old 
"who  feared  as  they  entered  the  cloud."  We 
suffer  confusion  because  we  see  spiritual 
reality  through  a  glass  darkly  and  in  that 
mood  of  uncertainty  we  sometimes  forget  to 
act  upon  the  light  we  actually  enjoy. 

We  can  scarcely  estimate  the  value  of  the 
service  rendered  to  religion  and  especially  to 
Bible  study  by  a  certain  brilliant  English 
essayist.  His  major  study  was  not  religion 
and  his  attitude  toward  the  faith  once  deliv- 
ered to  the  saints  was  commonly  regarded  as 
unfriendly.  But  in  his  little  book,  "Litera- 
ture and  Dogma,"  Matthew  Arnold  brought 
out  over  and  over  again  with  his  marvelous 
skill  and  effective  expression  the  helpful 
truth  that  the  statements  of  the  Bible  touch- 
ing great  spiritual  realities  do  not  undertake 
to  be  exact  and  final.  The  language  is  "fluid, 
passing,  poetic,"  rather  than  mathematically 
and  scientifically  exact. 

And  in  all  religious  speech  when  we  come 
to  deal  with  such  august  themes  as  God  and 


34      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

prayer,  duty  and  redemption,  immortality 
and  a  final  judgment,  our  expressions  are  as 
it  were  ''thrown  out"  at  these  sublime  real- 
ities confessedly  too  great  for  perfect  com- 
prehension or  exhaustive  definition.  In  a 
word,  the  Bible  is  literature  and  not  scientific 
dogma.  Our  religious  knowledge  at  its  best 
shades  ofif  into  infinite  spaces  where  our 
plumb  lines  do  not  touch  bottom. 

It  is  good  for  every  thoughtful  person 
called  to  live  his  Christian  life  in  quarters 
where  the  principle  of  organic  evolution  is 
frankly  and  fearlessly  accepted,  where  liter- 
ary and  historical  study  has  greatly  modified 
the  popular  feeling  touching  the  original 
documents  of  Christian  faith,  where  the  study 
of  psychology  has  made  this  human  nature 
of  ours  seem  a  new  and  more  puzzling  phe- 
nomenon—it is  good  for  any  such  thoughtful 
person  to  read,  mark,  learn,  and  inwardly 
digest  the  full  implication  of  Matthew  Arn- 
old's contention.  He  may  at  first  feel  as  if 
the  foundations  were  slipping  out  from 
under  him,  but  if  he  will  persist,  he  will  find 
his  mind  cleared  and  his  heart  reassured  as 
to  the  abiding  worth  of  such  knowledge  as 
we   do   possess    touching    spiritual    reality, 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  35 

stopping  though  that  knowledge  does  a  long 
way  this  side  of  completeness. 

He  was  a  wise  man  in  religious  matters 
who  said,  ''We  know— "and  then  added  mod- 
estly,—  ''in  part/'  This  was  not  a  statement 
emanating  from  some  indifferent  agnostic 
who,  because  religious  questions  are  difficult, 
insists  that  he  does  not  know  anything  about 
them.  It  was  not  the  statement  of  a  defiant 
.infidel  who,  because  he  does  not  understand 
everything  about  religion  as  he  would  like  to, 
declares  that  neither  he  nor  any  one  under- 
stands anything  about  it.  It  was  not  the 
statement  of  one  of  those  hesitaidng  indiyjd- 
uals  who  are  always  trying  to  steer  a  safe 
course  somewhere  between  yes  and  no,  be- 
tween the  right  of  it  and  the  wrong  of  it,  who 
are  never  quite  sure  whether  there  is  a  God 
or  not,  but  prefer  to  leave  it  an  open  question, 
with  an  ill-defined  notion  that  the  truth  lies, 
perhaps,  about  halfway  between  the  two 
claims. 

This  man  who  said,  "We  know,  in  part,'' 
was  not  an  agnostic  nor  an  infidel  nor  a  hesi- 
tator.  He  knew  certain  things.  He  was 
sure  of  them.  He  was  ready  to  say  so  right 
out  in  meeting  and  to  stand  up  and  be  cut  in 


36      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

two  for  them  if  need  be.  "I  know  whom  I 
have  beheved''— he  felt  no  uncertainty  on 
that  point.  It  is  a  long  step  toward  useful 
faith  to  know  'Svhom"  one  has  believed,  even 
though  he  remains  uncertain  as  to  just  what 
he  believes  at  some  points.  "I  know  the 
grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ"— and  this 
spiritual  energy  inwardly  experienced  had 
changed  him  from  a  narrow,  bigoted,  perse- 
cuting Pharisee  into  a  man  able  to  write  the 
best  hymn  on  love  to  be  found  in  print. 
When  you  read  that  hymn  which  opens 
"Though  I  speak  with  the  tongues  of  men 
and  of  angels  and  have  not  love,  I  am  be- 
come as  sounding  brass  or  a  tinkling  cym- 
bal," you  can  think  of  nothing  better— and 
the  author  of  it  embodied  the  spirit  of  it  in 
his  everyday  life.  "I  know  that  all  things 
work  together  for  good  to  them  that  love 
God"— and  in  his  particular  case  "all  things" 
included  a  great  deal  of  hardship  and  perse- 
cution, of  disappointment  and  sorrow,  but  he 
never  wavered  in  his  faith  that  some  wise 
purpose  was  being  furthered  by  it  all.  This 
and  much  more  he  knew.  "In  part  we  know," 
was  the  way  he  would  have  placed  his  em- 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  37 

phasis  and  the  actual  content  of  his  knowl- 
edge was  large  indeed. 

He  makes  his  statement  as  an  honest,  mod- 
est, reasonable  man  face  to  face  with  those 
spiritual  realities  which  are  too  great  for 
perfect  comprehension  or  final  statement. 
His  knowledge  of  them  was  considerable,  but 
in  his  judgment  they  bulked  greater  than  all 
our  human  knowledge  of  them.  He  must 
have  realized  when  he  said  this  that  he  was 
himself  a  man  of  no  mean  attainments.  He 
wrote  something  like  one  third  of  the  New 
Testament  with  his  own  hand.  He  has  prob- 
ably done  more  to  shape  Christian  thought 
than  any  other  one  save  Christ  Himself.  He 
had  in  his  own  life  been  caught  up  into  the 
third  heaven,  whatever  that  may  mean— it 
points,  undoubtedly,  to  some  extraordinary 
spiritual  experience.  He  was  the  most  effec- 
tive missionary  of  a  new  faith  the  world  has 
ever  seen.  He  was  a  man  of  marvelous  reach 
and  grasp :  yet  face  to  face  w^ith  those  great 
realities,  God  and  duty,  prayer  and  redemp- 
tion, immortality  and  the  final  judgment,  he 
frankly  confesses  that  the  returns  are  not  all 
in ;  that  the  last  word  has  not  been  said  and 


38      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

cannot  now  be  said;  that  the  full  apprecia- 
tion of  these  high  values  has  not  been 
reached.  He  had  the  quality  of  intellectual 
honesty  and  modesty.  He  would  have 
counted  it  wrong  to  assert  more  than  one 
feels  to  be  true.  He  would  have  shrunk 
from  assuming  a  thoroughness  of  knowledge 
and  a  confidence  of  faith  which  were  not  his 
own,  even  as  he  would  have  shrunk  from 
stealing  some  other  man's  clothing  that  he 
might  appear  the  more  richly  appareled. 

We  are  glad  to  find  these  words  on  the  lips 
of  this  great  disciple;  they  are  reassuring. 
They  match  our  own  mood.  They  bring 
cheer  to  those  of  us  who  have  been  consid- 
erably troubled  by  the  limitations  of  our  own 
religious  knowledge  and  by  those  remainders 
of  uncertainty  which  hang  upon  our  spirit- 
ual horizon  like  low-lying  clouds.  They  fit 
into  the  temper  of  this  modern  time  of  ques- 
tioning and  unrest  so  much  in  evidence  on 
the  college  campus,  in  all  university  circles, 
and  in  the  critical  portion  of  the  world  gen- 
erally. 

The  words  of  this  intellectually  honest 
man  suggest  that  finality  in  religious  belief 
is  more  difficult  than  some  of  the  earlier  gen- 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  39 


erations  in  their  simplicity  supposed.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  one  does  not  find  those  once 
famiHar  words  "Finis"  or  "The  End'^ 
printed  on  the  last  page  of  a  book  so  com- 
monly as  in  other  days.  Even  where  the  au- 
thor may  have  said  his  entire  say  in  several 
volumes,  each  one  as  bulky  as  a  volume  of 
the  Britannica,  he  knows  that  there  is  more 
to  be  said.  He  leaves  the  way  open  without 
trying  for  a  moment  to  block  it  by  writing 
down  "The  End." 

We  are  conscious,  some  of  us  painfully  so, 
some  of  us  joyously  so,  that  we  have  not 
reached  the  terminus  on  any  of  the  great 
trunk  lines  of  religious  inquiry.  We  are 
scattered  along  at  various  way-stations, 
thankful  for  the  part  we  know,  grateful  for 
the  progress  made,  but  confessing  with  the 
apostle  of  old  that  we  have  not  attained,  that 
we  are  not  already  made  perfect  either  in 
practice  or  in  theory.  But  if  we  have  caught 
the  spirit  of  that  apostle,  we  are  bent  on 
using  the  part  we  know  that  we  may  press 
toward  the  mark  for  the  prize  of  the  high 
calling  of  God.  This,  you  may  say,  is  the 
dominant  mood  of  the  really  aspiring  ele- 
ment in  that  cautious,  critical,  inquiring  tern- 


40      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

per  so  prevalent  in  modern  life.  We  are, 
therefore,  grateful  for  the  word  of  this  mod- 
est, reasonable  man  who,  with  all  his  unusual 
store  of  spiritual  experience,  said  quietly, 
"We  know  in  part/' 

If  we  are  to  use  language  at  all  in  giving 
expression  to  our  own  religious  life  or  in 
endeavoring  to  communicate  it  to  others,  we 
must  do  it  as  Arnold  said,  in  a  literary  rather 
than  in  a  dogmatic  way.  The  larger  portion 
of  it  will  be  language  which  suggests  rather 
than  defines.  We  shall  employ  many  terms 
which  serve  as  poetic  symbols  of  certain 
transcendent  realities  standing  over  against 
them  rather  than  as  the  exact  mathematical 
equivalents  of  those  realities. 

And  our  knowledge  of  those  realities  will  be 
confessedly  incomplete.  If  we  had  succeeded 
in  drawing  a  hard  and  fast  line  around  the 
being  and  character  of  God,  He  would  by 
that  very  fact  cease  to  be  to  us  the  Infinite 
One.  He  would  be  defined  and  limited  by  our 
own  exhaustive  knowledge  of  Him.  ''We  do 
not  knov/  anything  about  God  unless  we  first 
know  that  we  cannot  know  Him  perfectly." 
If  there  were  nothing  more  in  prayer  or  in 
the  great  process  of  moral  recovery  wrought 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  41 

out  in  what  we  call  redemption  or  in  our  ex- 
pectation of  the  life  eternal  than  could  be 
stated  in  black  and  white,  then  those  com- 
manding interests  would  be  at  once  com- 
pressed within  limits  which  would  rob  them  of 
much  of  their  present  helpfulness.  We  can- 
not put  into  precise  definitions  the  great  truths 
of  religious  life  as  we  might  do  with  some 
proposition  in  trigonometry.  *^It  doth  not 
yet  appear  what  we  shall  be"  or  what  those 
spiritual  forces  may  be  made  to  yield,  or 
what  shall  be  the  full  significance  of  the 
great  consummation  for  which  we  hope  and 
toward  which  we  patiently  move.  It  doth 
not  yet  appear  what  any  of  these  in  their 
final  outcome  shall  be— it  is  enough  to  know 
that  this  quest  for  ultimate  achievements 
which  elude  exact  and  final  statement  will 
make  us  'like  Him."  We  shall  in  the  con- 
summation be  like  the  highest  our  minds  can 
now  conceive. 

In  speaking  to  you,  then,  regarding  the 
worth  of  this  incomplete  knowledge  let  me 
consider  in  practical  fashion  tw^o  or  three 
fundamentals  in  our  religious  thinking. 
Some  of  you  may  have  been  disturbed  as  to 
the  doctrine  of  Providence.    You  have  been 


42      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

told  on  high  authority  that  God  reigns  and 
that  He  does  all  things  well.  When  times 
are  good  and  things  are  coming  your  way, 
you  actually  believe  it.  You  see  that  the  way 
of  the  transgressor  is  hard,  as  it  should  be. 
You  see  that  the  way  of  righteousness  seems 
on  the  whole  to  be  the  way  of  peace  and 
honor.  You  share  in  the  comfortable  per- 
suasion that  all  things  taken  together  in  their 
completeness  and  final  outcome  are  working 
a  net  result  which  will  be  good  for  those  who 
are  faced  right. 

But  about  the  time  you  have  gotten  your 
doctrine  of  Providence  all  snug  you  may  wit- 
ness some  occurrence  like  this.  Here  in  your 
own  circle  of  friends  a  young  Christian^ 
mother  dies !  She  was  an  ideal  daughter,  a 
devoted  wife,  and  the  beautiful  mother  of 
children  who  loved  her  and  needed  her  com- 
panionship more  than  they  needed  anything 
else  on  earth  apparently.  But  with  a  whole 
community  of  people,  perhaps,  praying  for 
her  recovery  she  died,  while  just  around  the 
corner  a  group  of  rascals,  who  are  making 
the  world*  worse  rather  than  better,  lived  on, 
flourishing  like  so  many  green  bay  trees. 
Then  somehow  your  doctrine  of  Providence 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  43 

I 
receives  a  hard  shock.     It  does  not  seem  to        j 

be  quite  so  clear  that_all  things,  even  to  the  ^ 

falHng  of  a  sparrow  or  the  numbering  of  the  j 

hairs  of  our  heads,  are  ordered  by  the  rule  ; 

of  a  wise  and  good  God.  j 

What  shall  we  say  ?  We  know  that  situa- 
tion as  we  know  the  whole  mystery  of  human  \ 
existence,  only  in  part.  We  know  the  useful- 
ness of  that  fair  young  life  here,  we  do  not  ] 
know  to  what  further  and  perhaps  higher  ; 
service  it  has  been  called  there.  We  see  what 
has  been  interrupted  here,  we  do  not  see  i 
what  has  been  taken  up  further  on.  We  do  ^ 
not  know  the_  ultimate  effect  of  this  stern  | 
sorrow  upon  that  household  compelled  now  ,; 
to  regird  all  their  powers  as  they  walk  in  the  j 
shadow  of  a  great  bereavement.  We  do  not  j 
even  know  God's  ultimate  purpose  for  those  ' 
rascals  who  lived  on— the  returns  are  not  all  j 
in  for  them  either.  We  know  in  part,  but  ] 
the  part  we  know,  taking  human  life  broadly,  - 
is  so  reassuring  as  to  the  wisdom  and  justice  ] 
of  the  divine  character  evidenced  in  His  deal-  ' 
ings  with  us  that  we  are  willing  to  trust  God 
and  wait.  We  walk  on  not  by  sight,  but  by  ■? 
faith.                                                                         .^JJ 

Ships  in  Norway  entering  the  great  fiords    \  ' 


44      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

sometimes  sail  so  close  to  the  cliffs  that  one 
can  stand  on  deck  and  almost  lay  his  hand 
on  the  face  of  the  rock.  When  one  captain 
was  asked  about  the  peril  of  it,  he  said, 
*There  is  no  danger.  That  which  is  in  sight 
indicates  what  is  out  of  sight.  The  slant 
above  the  water  line  indicates  the  slant  below. 
We  are  perfectly  safe." 

The  general  slant  of  God's  dealings  with 
men,  taking  the  facts  as  we  know  them  in 
the  total  impression  they  make  on  our  minds 
as  to  His  wisdom  and  justice,  is  such  that  we 
find  ourselves  prepared  to  trust  Him  below 
the  water  line  of  our  knowledge.  Therefore, 
when  we  cannot  in  some  difficult  situation 
make  out  His  ultimate  purpose  and  meaning, 
we  fall  back  upon  our  confidence  in  His 
moral  integrity. 

As  to  our  faith  in  the  divine  integrity  it 
has  seemed  to  me  that  serious  and  observant 
men  should  not  long  remain  in  doubt.  It  is 
a  faith  which  rests  upon  a  wide  induction  of 
fact  vaster  by  far  than  my  own  experience 
of  His  dealings  with  me  or  my  own  observa- 
tion of  those  facts  which  come  within  the 
range  of  my  personal  vision.  It  is  like  re- 
peating an  axiom  to  say  that  the  creature 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  45 

nowhere  rises  above  the  Creator,  the  stream 
is  never  higher  than  the  source.  If  men  at 
any  time,  anywhere  show  themselves  good, 
there  must  be  goodness  in  the  Creator  of 
those  men,  goodness  in  the  force  or  forces 
lying  back  of  them,  name  those  forces  as  you 
will. 

And  if  the  stream  of  human  goodness  has 
been  widening,  deepening,  flowing  more 
strongly  as  the  ages  have  come  and  gone, 
this  seems  to  point  back  to  character  and 
purpose  in  the  One  who  set  the  stream  flow- 
ing in  the  first  place.  Goodness  in  man 
argues  goodness  in  God  while  badness  in 
man  does  not  argue  badness  in  God,  because 
sane  men  everywhere  regard  goodness  as 
normal  and  badness  as  an  abnormal  thing  to 
be  overcome  and  cast  out. 

And  look  at  the  swelling  tide  of  human 
goodness  as  it  flows  down  through  the  ages, 
gathering  force  and  volume  as  it  comes  upon 
its  victorious  w^ay!  Look  at  Livingstone, 
laying  down  his  life  to  carry  light  into  a 
dark  continent,  spending  himself  freely  for 
those  whose  lives  were  then  unspeakably  re- 
pulsive! Look  at  Lincoln,  counting  not  his 
life  dear  if  he  might  serve  the  cause  of  the 


46      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

Union  and  the  interests  of  his  brothers  in 
bonds!  Look  at  Jane  Addams,  not  holding  — 
her  intelHgent  and  cultured  life  apart  for 
selfish  enjoyment  with  those  of  her  own 
class,  but  investing  it  with  a  free  hand  for 
the  help  of  those  impeded  lives  which  find 
themselves  on  Halsted  Street,  Chicago! 
Look  at  the  vast  array  of  human  goodness  as 
it  masses  itself  in  saints  and  seers,  in  heroes 
and  martyrs,  in  teachers  and  mothers,  going 
forth  not  to  be  ministered  unto  but  to  min- 
ister and  to  give  their  lives  for  the  better- 
ment of  the  race!  Look  at  it  and  then  ask 
yourself  if  you  can  believe  for  one  moment 
that  all  this  goodness  originated  itself,  per- 
sisted and  increased  in  opposition  to  the  will 
of  the  Creator  or  in  the  face  of  His  moral 
indifference  or  in  the  absence  of  any  crea- 
tive goodness  in  Him !  The  claim  on  the  face 
of  it  would  seem  unspeakably  absurd.  This 
wider  induction  of  fact  begets  a  profound 
faith  in  the  moral  character  of  God. 

Heroes  and  martyrs  in  every  age  of  the 
world  have  been  laying  down  their  lives  for 
a  principle.  The  true  mother  everywhere 
cares  for  her  sick  child,  counting  not  her 
own  pleasure,  her  comfort,  or  even  her  life 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  47 

dear  if  she  may  save  her  child.  The  poor 
dog  attached  to  his  master  goes  to  the  spot 
where  he  saw  them  lay  the  body  and  whines 
''for  the  touch  of  a  vanished  hand,  for  the 
sound  of  a  voice  that  is  still." 

H-as  the  Creator  of  such  moral  integrity 
in  those  heroes  and  martyrs  kept  none  of  it 
for  Himself  ?  Has  He,  out  of  the  ages  gone, 
out  of  the  brute  life  of  our  sub-human  ances- 
tors, produced  such  surpassing  devotion  in 
the  heart  of  the  mother  with  no  devotion  in 
His  own  heart  toward  His  helpless  child? 
Has  He  instilled  such  faithful  affection  in 
the  very  dogs  that  perish,  but  failed  utterly 
to  share  in  that  love  Himself  ?  It  is  unthink- 
able! 

These  forces  which  produce  all  these  high 
qualities  of  life,  attachment  to  the  right,  de- 
votion to  the  helpless,  faithful  affection  for 
those  we  love,  are  universal  forces.  They 
are  in  the  last  analysis  divine  forces.  When 
we  look  at  the  results  accomplished,  at  the 
fruit  which  the  great  tree  of  universal  forces 
yields,  we  cannot  but  believe  that  there  is 
moral  character  at  the  heart  of  this  system 
of  energy.  Therefore,  reassured  by  our  faith 
in  the  moral  character  of  God,  when  we  can- 


48      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

not  see  we  trust,  remembering  that  as  to  the 
full  significance  and  final  meaning  of  many 
a  strange  experience,  "we  know  in  part." 
Thus  our  confidence  in  what  we  call  the  doc- 
trine of  Providence  becomes  to  us  a  strong 
and  defensible  tower  to  shield  us  in  the  time 
of  storm. 

Take  also  the  matter  of  prayer  and  the 
way  it  enters  into  the  formation  of  character 
and  the  shaping  of  events !  We  know  be- 
yond a  peradventure  that  prayer  registers  a 
definite  and  wholesome  influence  on  the  life 
of  the  man  who  pra3^s.  Those  who  loudly 
assert  that  virtue  and  vice  are  as  purely 
physical  products  as  sugar  and  vitriol,  that 
all  right  action  and  wrong  action  can  be  ac- 
counted for  on  material  grounds,  have  not 
made  out  their  case.  They  have  not  begun 
to  make  it  out.  In  the  face  of  the  present 
claim  made  by  so  many  eminent  philosophers 
and  scientists  that  ultimate  reality  is  sentient 
mind  or  spirit,  the  contention  of  these  mate- 
rialists becomes  daily  more  feeble. 

There  is  something  unseen,  mysterious, 
but  real  and  powerful,  which  impels  certain 
people  to  love  the  unlovely,  to  make  sacrifices 
for  the  thoughtless  and  the  ungrateful,  to 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  49 

stand  firm  in  the  path  of  duty  when  it  is  any- 
thing but  tlie  hue  of  least  resistance.  The 
love  of  right,  the  sense  of  obligation,  the 
habit  of  adherence  to  principle,  all  these  are 
as  real  as  granite.  Yet  the  forces  which 
make  them  strong  are  spiritual  forces  and 
these  spiritual  forces  receive  constant  rein- 
forcement from  the  h^ibit  of  prayer. 

This  part  we  know.  We  have  seen  the 
hearts  of_men  turned  from  anger  to  love, 
from  sinful  to  holy  purpose,  from  weakness 
to  high  resolve  by  prayer.  We  have  seen  the 
Jiome  life  made  sweeter  because  each  day  the 
members  of  a  household  come  together  and 
kneel  before  God,  confessing  their  faults, 
asking  His  guidance  and  allowing  that  which 
is  true  and  right  within  them  to  grow 
stronger  by  its  sense  of  communion  with 
Him  who  is  altogether  true  and  right.  Any 
reasonable  man  in  any  part  of  the  world 
would  feel  that  his  life,  his  property,  and  his 
family  would  be  altogether  safer  in  a  com- 
munity where  men  prayed  habitually  than  in 
one  w^here  they  only  used  the  name  of  God 
profanely.    This  part  we  know  about  prayer. 

But  as  to  the  ultimate  and  transcendent  ef- 
fect of  it,  as  to  the  final  philosophy  of  those 


50      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

mysterious  actions  and  reactions  which  take 
place  when  we  kneel  before  Him,  as  to  the 
precise  way  in  which  the  finite  spirit  may  be- 
come a  co-laborer  with  the  Infinite  Spirit  in 
the  shaping  of  events,  I  freely  confess  that 
there  is  a  great  deal  which  I  do  not  under- 
stand. I  must  in  the  nature  of  the  case  rec- 
ognize the  incompleteness  of  my  knowledge 
just  as  I  recognize  it  when  I  think  of  the 
ether  or  of  those  waves  of  motion  which 
make  possible  the  wireless  telegraph,  or  of 
those  mysterious  rays  which  pierce  through 
what  we  had  learned  to  call  opaque,  reveal- 
ing that  which  was  hidden. 

I  know  in  part  touching  this  wonderful 
exercise  we  call  prayer,  but  the  part  I  know 
is  so  attended  by  beautiful  and  beneficent  re- 
sults that  I  want  my  prayer  for  the  coming 
of  God's  kingdom,  for  the  doing  of  His  will 
on  earth,  for  the  gift  of  bread  sufficient  for 
the  day's  need,  for  forgiveness  and  deliver- 
ance from  evil — I  want  that  prayer  to  go  up 
winging  its  way  to  the  throne  of  the  Unseen 
backed  by  all  the  faith  and  hope  and  love  I 
can  put  into  it.  And  I  am  not  troubled  by 
the  fact  that  I  cannot  in  mathematical  fash- 
ion demonstrate  all  the  grounds  of  my  confi- 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  51  j 

'  ~~~  "  i 

dence  or  predict  with  scientific  certainty  the 
resuUs  of  my  petition,  for,  Hke  the  apostle  of 
old,  I  know  in  part. 

How  narrow,  unreasonable,  and  dogmatic  lA^ 
unbehef  sometimes  shows  itself!  Here  is  a 
young  man  who,  intellectually  speaking,  be-  | 
longs  to  the  newly  rich.  His  recently  ac-  ] 
quired  knowledge  does  not  set  easily  on  him  ; 
as  yet.  He  says  in  haughty  fashion,  *'I  will 
never  accept  anything  which  I  cannot  prove.  , 
I  will  not  participate  in  any  religious  exer-  j 
cise  which  my  intelligence  does  not  thor-  j 
oughly  understand  and  endorse.''  All  this,  at  I 
first  glance,  might  seem  like  a  bit  of  that  | 
fearless  intellectual  honesty  and  candor  which  j 
are  rightly  held  in  such  high  esteem  in  j 
university  circles.  But  it  is  not  that;  it  is  ' 
only  a  bit  of  unconscious  yet  none  the  less 
humorous  *'bluff." 

We  are  not  to  participate  in  anything  g^ 
which  our  intelligence  does  not  thoroughly 
understand  and  endorse?  It  might  be  well 
to  scrutinize  that  assertion.  Here  you  are 
down  town  on  a  dark,  cold  night.  You  see 
/  an  electric  car  approaching  and  you  wish  to 
feach  your  home.  Not  one  in  a  hundred  of 
you,  not  one  in  a  thousand  of  those  who  use 


52      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


these  cars  could,  if  his  hfe  depended  upon  it, 
explain  how  it  is  that  a  certain  invisible  form 
of  energy  transmitted  along  that  wire  can 
in  that  ordinary  street  car  be  transformed 
into  motion  carrying  it  swiftly  along,  and 
into  light  making  it  possible  for  you  to  read 
your  evening  paper,  and  into  heat  making 
you  thoroughly  comfortable  as  you  ride 
home.  And  if  you  should  be  privileged  to 
hear  the  best  explanation  attainable  given  to 
it  by  some  man  of  science,  you  would  still  be 
compelled  to  walk  by  faith  and  not  by  sight 
for  you  would  recognize  the  fact  that  he, 
too,  was  throwing  out  his  words  in  literary 
fashion  at  realities  confessedly  too  mysteri- 
ous for  perfect  comprehension  or  exact  defi- 
nition. 

But  how  foolish  you  would  be  to  decline 
the  help  of  that  mysterious  force  which 
moves,  heats,  and  lights  the  street  car  simply 
because  your  knowledge  of  all  that  is  in- 
volved in  those  processes  stops  a  long  way 
this  side  of  completeness !  How  foolish  you 
would  be  to  refuse  the  help  of  the  car  and 
plod  along  through  the  darkness  and  the 
sleet,  arriving  at  home  an  hour  late  for  din- 
ner !    Hear,  then,  the  parable  of  the  trolley 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  53 


car!     Make  your  own  application  of  it  to 
forces  spiritual ! 

Take    the   question    of    the    future    life. 
There  is  a  great  deal  here  which  we  would 
like  to  know.    What  are  our  loved  ones,  who 
have  gone  on,  doing  now  ?    Are  they  the  con- 
scious witnesses  of  the  blunders  and  failures 
we  make  here?    How^is  right  rewarded  and 
wrong  punished  in  that  other  world  when 
the  two  are  so  intricately  interwoven  here? 
No  man  is  so  white  a  sheep  but  that  there 
are  occasional  patches  of  goat  about  him 
here  and  there.    No  man  is  so  bad  but  that 
there  is  some  good  in  him  if  we  "observingly 
distil  it  out."     And  what  of  the  final  out- 
come?   Can  the  good  people  of  the  world  be 
happily  content  if  the  sinful  souls  they  loved 
are  in  conscious  pain,  or  even  if  those  sinful 
souls    have    been    remorselessly    wiped    off 
the  slate  of  existence?     Is  it,   indeed,   too 
much    to    hope   that    God's    persuasions    to 
righteousness,  being  infinite,  may  prove  at 
last  irresistible  and  so  in  every  case  suc- 
cessful? 

Dare  we  say  it  and  feel  it  and  act  upon  it? 

''  Oh  !  yet  we  trust  that  somehow  good 
Shall  be  the  final  goal  of  ill, 


54      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

That  nothing  walks  with  aimless  feet, 
That  not  one  life  shall  be  destroyed, 
Or  cast  as  rubbish  to  the  void 

When  God  hath  made  the  pile  complete." 

Thus  men  and  women,  who  have  loved  and 
lost  those  who  have  passed  out  of  this  world 
without  a  sign  of  genuine  repentance  or  of 
saving  faith,  have  queried  ever,  A  child  can 
in  five  minutes  ask  more  questions  touching 
the  future  world  than  all  the  philosophers 
and  theologians  on  earth  can  answer  in  as 
many  years. 

We  must  remain  for  the  present  content 
with  knowledge  confessedly  incomplete.  We 
cannot  measure  off  the  streets  of  the  new 
Jerusalem  in  kilometers.  We  cannot  avail 
ourselves  of  any  full  description  of  its  at- 
tractions or  of  its  dangers  in  any  kind  of 
Baedeker.  We  cannot  undertake  to  lay  out 
any  detailed  program  of  God's  dealings  with 
the  good  and  the  bad  people  of  earth  in  all 
the  unending  years.  Nor  is  there  the  slight- 
est obligation  resting  upon  us  to  make  an 
attempt  at  the  construction  of  such  a  pro- 
gram or  at  the  composition  of  such  a  geog- 
raphy of  the  future  world. 

We  know  in  part  and  the  part  we  may  feel 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  55 

reasonably  sure  about  is  something  like  this : 
I  feel  a  profound  confidence  that  we  shall  live 
on  after  death.  The  grounds  of  my  hope  are 
many.  Here  are  the  four  main  considera- 
tions on  which  my  personal  anticipation 
rests.  The  mass  of  unreason  and  injustice  I 
would  have  left  upon  my  hands,  unexplained 
and  unexplainable,  if  I  should  undertake  to 
deny  the  truth  of  immortality,  is  one.  I  can- 
not help  believing  that  the  great  book  of  life 
will  read  right  when  we  read  it  through— 
and  that  calls  for  more  chapters  than  we  find 
in  this  present  world. 

The  all  but  universal  and  persistent  desire 
of  men  for  a  future  life  is  another  ground 
for  faith.  Somehow  the  integrity  of  the  uni- 
verse is  such  that  it  does  not  develop  in  men 
normal,  widespread,  and  persistent  desires 
unless  standing  over  against  them  some- 
where there  is  the  corresponding  satisfaction 
for  those  desires. 


"It  must  be  so,  Plato, 
Thou  reasonest  well ; 
Else  whence  this  pleasing  hope, 
This  fond  desire, 
This  longing  after  immortality?'* 


c6      THE  AlODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


The  fact  that  the  clear  visions  and  bright 
hopes  of  the  best  poets  and  prophets  the 
world  has  known  have  been  so  largely  on  the 
side  of  the  life  eternal,  means  much.  The 
seers  have  sung,  and  the  prophets  have  ut- 
tered their  highest  anticipations  by  the  power 
of  an  endless  life. 

The  words  and  the  attitude  of  firm  confi- 
dence on  the  part  of  that  supreme  figure  in 
history,  Jesus  Christ,  mean  still  more.  He 
saw  clearly,  spoke  wisely,  lived  divinely.  I 
cannot  believe  that  here  He  reared  His  ex- 
pectation and  ours  upon  a  fundamental  mis- 
take. He  did  not  argue  about  immortality 
or  seek  to  establish  it  by  the  citation  of  proof 
texts;  He  moved  habitually  in  the  strength 
of  His  consciousness  of  the  life  eternal. 

Reason,  experience,  the  best  in  literature, 
and  the  attitude  of  the  One  who  has  taken 
the  moral  government  of  the  world  upon  His 
shoulder  as  none  other  ever  has,  all  stand  so 
strongly  on  the  side  of  positive  faith  that  I 
feel  confident  of  an  unbroken  life.  The  terms 
and  conditions  of  that  life  I  must  leave  to 
Him  who  planned  it. 

As  to  the  fmal  judgment,  I  know  this:  I 
see  that  righteousness  and  love  are  useful 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  57 


and  beautiful  here— they  will  be  useful  and 
beautiful  anywhere;  and  the  clearer  the  light 
in  which  they  are  brought  to  stand,  the  more 
their  glory  will  be  revealed.  I  see  that  sin 
and  selfishness  are  mean  and  hateful  here— 
they  will  be  mean  and  hateful  anywhere ;  and 
the  clearer  the  light  in  which  they  stand,  the 
more  their  hatefulness  will  be  manifest. 

What  shall  be  the  final  fate  of  evil,  I  do 
not  undertake  to  say.  There  is  no  necessity 
for  me  to  outline  a  comprehensive  program 
for  the  endless  future.  The  clear  prospects 
of  the  life  to  come  where  righteousness  and 
love  shall  have  their  freer  chance  to  be  and 
to  do,  where  sin  and  selfishness  shall  meet 
with  more  awful  rebuke  in  that  light  where 
there  is  no  darkness  at  all,  these  are  sufficient 
to  stimulate  right  action  and  to  give  effective 
warning  to  those  who  would  identify  their 
lives  with  any  manner  of  evil  purpose.  As 
to  the  rest,  we  may,  in  view  of  the  incom- 
pleteness of  our  knowledge,  safely  leave  it  to 
the  wisdom  and  the  justice  of  the  Eternal. 

We  frankly  confess  that  we  know  in  part 
—  it  is  all  we  can  do.  But  the  worth  of  this 
incomplete  knowledge  springs  from  the  fact 
that  while  we  know  in  part,  the  part  we  know 


58      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

is  the  part  we  habitually  use.  We  wish  we 
knew  more ;  we  hope  to  know  more  some  time 
but,  meanwhile,  it  is  the  act  of  wisdom  to 
utilize  such  knowledge  as  we  do  possess. 
In  almost  any  direction,  unless  it  be  pure 
t  mathematics  or  formal  logic,  our  knowledge, 
even  in  the  sophomore  year,  stops  a  long  way 
this  side  of  completeness.  No  man  knows 
the  length  and  breadth,  the  height  and  depth 
of  his  wife's  love  for  him  if  she  is  a  good 
woman.  Some  part  of  it  he  knows ;  but  that 
wondrous  affection  she  might  show  in  some 
emergency,  nursing  him  through  a  long  ill- 
ness, or  sharing  with  him  some  painful  ex- 
perience, or  bearing  with  him  some  heavy 
burden,  he  cannot  know  until  the  time  comes 
for  the  extraordinary  manifestation  of  that 
affection.  But  the  part  of  the  strength  and 
beauty  of  that  woman's  love  which  he  knows, 
is  the  part  he  uses.  It  ministers  to  his  happi- 
ness and  makes  him  feel  every  day  in  the 
year  that  he  ought  to  be  a  better  man  to  be 
worthy  of  it.  And  this  is  the  attitude  for  the 
reasonably  religious  man.  Those  great  reali- 
ties, God  and  duty,  prayer  and  redemption, 
immortality  and  the  final  judgment,  are  too 
great    for   perfect   comprehension;   but   he 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  59 


knows  something-  of  them  and  the  part  he 
knows  is  the  part  he  uses. 

Next  door  to  my  home  in  CaHfornia  were 
two  Httle  neighbors,  boys  of  three  and  five. 
They  were  close  friends  of  mine  and  they 
taught  me  much.  Their  father  was  a  physi- 
cian, a  busy,  useful,  Christian  man.  The 
boys  understood  their  father's  life  in  part. 
They  knew  that  he  was  a  doctor  and  that  he 
visited  sick  people  to  make  them  well;  but 
as  to  the  methods  he  employed  and  the 
remedies  he  used,  they  knew  nothing  at  all. 
They  knew  in  a  dim  sort  of  way  that  he  made 
the  money  which  paid  the  bills  and  kept  them 
in  a  home  of  comfort;  but  as  to  his  financial 
investments  and  prospects  for  the  future, 
they  knew  nothing  at  all.  They  knew  that 
along  with  the  hearty  good-will  he  felt  to- 
ward everybody  hejoved  their  mother  and 
them  supremely;  but  as  to  how  he  came  to 
love  that  particular  woman,  or  how  they  were 
born  of  that  love,  or  how  far  that  love  might 
go  in  defending  and  providing  for  them, 
they  never  concerned  themselves  for  one 
moment.  They  knew  their  father's  life 
in  part. 

But  here  again  the  part  they  knew  was  the 


6o      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

part  they  used.  They  Hved  in  their  father's 
house;  they  sat  at  his  table  and  ate  what  he 
provided  for  them;  they  greeted  him  with  a 
shout  when  he  came  in  from  his  work.  They 
obeyed  him  and  trusted  him  and  thought  he 
was  the  best  man  in  the  world.  They  climbed 
up  into  his  lap  and  talked  to  him  endlessly, 
not  about  his  practice,  but  about  their  own 
small  affairs,  their  tops  and  marbles  and 
wagon— as  he  wanted  them  to  do;  he  met 
them  always  on  their  own  ground  and  dealt 
with  them  in  the  terms  and  interests  of  their 
own  lives.  Thus  my  two  little  friends  lived 
and  grew,  knowing  their  father's  life  in  part. 
"Except  ye  become  as  little  children  ye 
shall  in  no  wise  enter  in!"  Except  you  be- 
come as  little  children  in  the  house  of  your 
Father  whose  total  life  transcends  your  com- 
prehension of  it,  whose  plans  and  purposes 
for  you  are  vaster  every  way  than  your  un- 
derstanding of  them,  ye  shall  in  no  wise  enter 
His  kingdom.  But  if  you  take  the  part  you 
know  and  use  it,  acting  on  it,  living  by  it, 
following  where  it  leads,  you  will  make  ad- 
vance as  surely  as  my  two  small  friends  are 
doing,  growing  up  toward  their  manhood 
knowing  their  father's  life  in  part. 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  6i 


How  plain  Christ  made  the  duty  of  using 
the  near  and  the  famihar  if  we  would  under- 
stand the  more  remote !  He  may  have  real- 
ized that  religion  would  speedily  become 
encrusted  with  misconceptions,  making  it  dif- 
ficult for  plain  people  to  get  at  the  vital  ele- 
ments in  it.  He  may  have  known  that  men 
would  write  big,  dull  books  about  it  which 
no  one  would  want  to  read.  He  may  have 
foreseen  that  learned  men  would  talk  about 
it,  using  for  the  most  part  technical,  incom- 
prehensible phrases  in  such  a  way  as  to  con- 
fuse the  people.  At  any  rate,  He  made  His 
own  teaching  simpler  than  that  of  any  one 
whose  words  stand  here  recorded. 

He  stood  once  at  midnight  talking  with  a 
thoughtful  man  regarding  certain  aspects  of 
the  religious  life.  He  was  speaking  of  the 
new  birth,  the  emergence  of  a  new  life  fresh 
and  full  of  promise.  ''How  can  these  things 
be  ?"  the  man  said.  "How  can  a  man  be  born 
when  he  is  old?''  The  creative  action  of  the 
Infinite  Spirit  upon  the  individual  moral  life 
was  to  him  an  inexplicable  mystery. 

Just  then  the  wind  rustled  the  leaves  over- 
head and  Jesus  said,  "The  wind  bloweth 
where  it  listeth,  and  thou  hearest  the  sound 


62      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

thereof,  but  canst  not  tell  whence  it  cometh, 
and  whither  it  goeth/' 

We  cannot  tell  why  the  wind  blows  one 
day  from  the  north  and  we  have  cold,  an- 
other day  from  the  south  and  we  have  heat, 
and  another  day  from  the  east  and  we  have 
rain.  We  cannot  explain  many  of  the  mys- 
teries connected  with  the  wind  or  how  it  is  re- 
lated to  all  the  other  forces  in  the  universe. 
But  a  man  who  is  a  fisherman  can  put  up  the 
little  sail  of  his  boat  and  fill  it  with  this  mys- 
terious wind.  He  can  sail  out  on  the  broad 
ocean  and  come  home  at  night  with  a  boat- 
load of  fish  to  feed  the  hungry.  The  wind 
that  fills  his  sail  he  knows  even  though  the 
origin,  the  destiny,  and  the  relationship  it 
sustains  to  the  other  forces  of  the  universe 
are  all  unknown  to  him.  And,  like  a  man  of 
sense,  the  part  he  knows  is  the  part  he  uses, 
as  he  relates  it  helpfully  to  the  needs  of  his 
personal  life. 

So  is  every  one  who  is  born  of  the  spirit, 
led  by  the  spirit,  used  by  the  spirit!  He 
knows  the  life  of  the  Infinite  Spirit  in  part, 
but  the  part  he  knows  is  the  part  he  uses  as 
he  relates  that  part  in  helpful  fashion  to  the 
needs  of  his  own  life. 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLEDGE  63 


When  we  start  in  after  that  common-sense 
fashion,  it  is  a  straight  course.  The  boy  be- 
gins his  study  of  mathematics  not  by  stand- 
ing speechless  and  helpless  before  the  mys- 
teries of  differential  calculus.  He  begins  by 
learning  to  count,  one,  two,  three,  four,  five, 
six,  seven,  eight,  nine,  ten.  He  goes  ahead, 
moving  along  that  plain  path  until  with  those 
same  ten  figures  he  may  be  computing  the 
courses  the  planets  take  or  measuring  the 
distance  of  the  fixed  stars. 

The  boy  begins  his  study  of  literature  not 
by  feeling  depressed  in  the  presence  of 
'Taradise  Lost''  or  "Sordello."  He  begins 
by  learning  his  letters,  a,  b,  c,  etc.,  and  by 
learning  the  simpler  combination  of  those 
letters  into  words  which  designate  objects 
and  acts  familiar  to  him  in  his  daily  life.  By 
and  by,  through  the  use  of  those  same 
twenty-six  letters,  he  is  making  his  way 
through  ''Hamlet''  and  "Macbeth,"  or  is 
walking  with  Emerson  and  Hegel  across  the 
fields  of  philosophy. 

In  every  situation  in  Hie  progresses  made 
not  by  taking  the  more  distant  and  difficulty 
problems  first,  not  by  being  appalled  and  dis- 
couraged over  the  amount  that  we  do  not 


64      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


know ;  progress  is  made  by  taking  the  part 
we  know  and  by  relating  that  to  our  own 
Hves  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  the  instru- 
ment for  gaining  fuller  knowledge.  And 
this  is  just  as  true  in  religion  as  in  other 
fields  of  thought  and  action.  "If  any  man 
will  do,  he  shall  know.''  And  in  his  doing 
let  him  deal  first  with  those  things  which  are 
near  and  familiar,  for  in  that  way  his  insight 
and  understanding  become  more  competent 
to  deal  with  things  remote. 

I  wish  I  might  persuade  any  student  who 
has  never  entered  into  an  open,  joyous. 
Christian  life  to  just  begin.  In  your  work 
as  a  teacher  you  will  need  the  great  stores  of 
help  which  this  will  open  up.  The  task  of 
education  at  its  best  is  not  to  impart  infor- 
mation or  to  give  technical  training  to  special 
faculties  in  the  pupil— all  this  is  only  sec- 
ondary. The  primary  thing  is  to  shape  and 
enrich  and  mature  that  august  thing  we  call 
"personality.''  Education  which  stops  short 
of  that  is  not  living  up  to  its  privileges.  In 
the  formation  of  personality  genuine  religion 
is  an  element  which  cannot  safely  be  left  out. 

In  connection  with  this  religious  life  of 
which  I  am  speaking  in  this  course  of  ad- 


INCOMPLETE  KNOWLE.-^GE  65 


dresses,  there  may  be  many  things  .vhich  you 
do  not  understand  nor,  perhaps,  believe.  We 
will  put  them  aside  for  the  moment,  not  ig- 
noring them,  but  merely  postponi^^ig  their 
consideration.  Take  the  part  you  kri\)w ;  the 
moral  imperative  of  living  the  best  life  you 
see— and  no  finer  life  than  that  of  a  true 
Christian  can  be  named;  the  need  of  some 
competent  guide  and  helper — and  none  bet- 
ter than  Jesus  of  Nazareth  has  thus  far  ap- 
peared; the  sure  benefits  to  be  obtained  by 
trust  and  obedience  to  the  Highest  you  rec- 
ognize; the  helpful  reactions  v^hich  come 
steadily  through  prayer  and  the  reading  of 
the  Bible ;  the  manifest  advantage  of  cherish- 
ing the  hope  of  a  future  life  and  of  facing 
squarely  upon  the  fact  that  what  a  man  sows 
he  reaps. 

All  this  you  know !  Let  the  part  you  know 
be  the  part  you  use.  If  you  will  take  what 
you  know,  act  upon  it,  build  it  into  your  own 
experience,  follow  where  it  leads,  you  will 
be  treading  the  path  which  will  bring  you  to 
the  place  where  you  will  know  even  as  you 
are  known. 


^t-XfxJt'^ 


^  ^^  ; /-  C  Cfci» 


V 


'  ^  III 

A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE 

IN  a  clever  magazine  article,  written  by  a 
man  of  affairs  about  a  year  ago,  this 
statement  was  made:  "Five  men  comprise 
Europe,  these  five  and  no  more,  —  King  Ed- 
ward of  England,  William  Hohenzollern  of 
Germany,  Archduke  Ferdinand,  heir  to  the 
throne  of  Austria,  Monsieur  Isvolsky,  Min- 
ister of  Foreign  Affairs  in  Russia,  and 
Merry  del  Val,  manipulator  of  the  political 
influence  of  the  Vatican !  There  used  to  be 
two  others,  but  one  of  them— Von  Biilow  by 
name— has  passed  into  that  obscurity  from 
which  few  statesmen  ever  return;  and  the 
other,  long  a  sinister  figure  on  the  shores  of 
the  Bosphorus,  is  now  a  prisoner  in  a  Saloni- 
can  Villa."  These  five  men  comprise  Europe, 
the  writer  said,  because  it  lies  within  their 
power  to  control  policies  which  will  shape 
the  history  of  the  years  that  lie  ahead. 

66 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  (yy 

I  do  not  undertake  to  pass  upon  the  valid- 
ity of  his  statement.  It  probably  sacrifices 
something  in  accuracy  in  order  to  be  epi- 
grammatic— most  epigrams  earn  their  living 
by  that  sort  of  self-sacrifice.  I  quote  the 
statement  as  indicative  of  the  fact  that  there 
are  in  any  period  of  history  a  few  pivotal 
men  upon  whose  influence  may  turn  the 
course  of  movements  mighty  and  far-reach- 
ing. 

In  similar  fashion  you  will  find  in  any 
body  of  teaching  a  few  key-words  which 
seem  to  unlock  the  doors  of  the  whole  mean- 
ing contained  there.  In  Christ's  teaching 
there  are  four  such  words.  If  I  should  suc- 
ceed in  holding  them  before  you  this  morn- 
ing with  something  of  their  full  import  so 
that  you  would  never  forget  them,  I  should 
feel  that  I  had  rendered  you  an  important 
service.  They  might  become  to  you  like  the 
four  cardinal  points  of  the  compass  in  your 
spiritual  voyaging  and,  held  clearly  in  view, 
they  would  help  you  to  orient  yourself  in  any 
part  of  the  world  or  in  any  phase  of  personal 
experience  which  might  arise ;  and  thus  they 
would  enable  you  to  lay  out  a  straight  course 
toward  the  haven  where  you  would  be. 


68      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

The  four  words  are  not  addressed  primar- 
ily to  a  man's  powers  of  perception  or  of  be- 
lief. They  are  addressed  primarily  to  the 
will.  They  are  meant  to  include  the  assent 
of  the  intelligence  and  to  enlist  the  deeper 
emotions  of  the  heart,  but  on  the  face  of 
them  they  call  upon  every  man  not  so  much 
to  believe  or  to  feel  as  to  act.  And  if  any 
man  will  act  upon  them,  he  will  speedily  dis- 
cover within  himself  certain  sublime  reac- 
tions. The  net  result  will  be  what  I  have 
called  a  constantly  deepening  experience. 
Let  me  name  them  to  you,  and  I  think  you 
will  agree  with  me  that  they  are  the  four 
great  words  in  the  Christian  message. 

The  first  one  is  the  word  "Come.''  It  in- 
vites the  movement  of  the  inner  life  toward 
that  which  is  central,  fundamental,  vital. 
How  often  you  find  that  word  upon  the  lips 
of  Christ.  ''Can  any  good  thing  come  out  of 
Nazareth  ?"  men  asked ;  can  the  Messiah,  for 
instance,  come  out  of  Nazareth  ?  His  answer 
was  not  an  argument  or  a  citation  of  proof 
texts,  but  an  invitation.  "Come  and  see." 
Come  and  test  these  Messianic  claims  for 
yourselves.  Put  them  to  the  proof  of  expe- 
rience. 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  69 


He  stood  there,  the  supreme  manifestation 
in  history  of  that  divine  helpfuhiess  which  is 
not  far  from  any  one  of  us,  for  in  it  and  hy 
it  we  Hve;  He  stood  there  calHng  upon  men 
to  come  to  Him  and  by  looking  into  His  face, 
by  hearing  His  words,  by  witnessing  His 
deeds,  by  taking  up  the  immediate  influence 
of  His  personahty  into  their  own  hves,  to 
decide  whether  or  not  any  good  thing  had 
come  out  of  Nazareth.  It  was  through  per- 
sonal experience  that  men  were  to  decide 
whether  or  not  the  Messiah  of  the  ages  had 
so  come.  ''Come  and  see"— it  was  the  call 
to  a  deeper  form  of  experience. 

Jesus  was  always  saying  that.  "If  any 
man  thirst,  let  him  come  unto  me,  and  drink." 
If  any  man  feels  that  his  spiritual  nature  is 
becoming  dry  and  unfruitful  like  some  arid 
field,  let  him  by  an  act  of  will,  by  taking  and 
holding  a  new  attitude  toward  the  central 
source  of  spiritual  impulse,  enter  anew  into 
personal  fellowship  with  the  divine  helpful- 
ness. His  inner  life  will  there  drink,  as  some 
thirsty  field  in  the  San  Joaquin  valley  in 
California  drinks  from  the  Merced  River 
flowing  bank  full  because  it  holds  the  melting 
snows  from  the  high  Sierras. 


70      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

"Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  labor  and  are 
heavy  laden,  and  I  will  give  you  rest."  The 
rest  named  here  was  no  idle  surcease  from 
toil.  Real  rest  is  never  merely  that — it  means 
a  renewal  of  power,  an  invigoration  of  all 
the  finer  energies  for  further  and  more  effec- 
tive effort.  This  is  what  Christ  promised  in 
that  deeper  experience  to  be  gained  by  enter- 
ing into  a  profounder  sense  of  fellowship 
with  Him.  If  any  life,  wearied  and  heavy 
laden,  feels  that  the  will  has  gone  lame,  that 
the  conscience  is  dulled,  that  the  moral  vigor 
is  unequal  to  the  demands  made  upon  it,  let 
it  come  unto  Christ  and  He  will  give  it  re- 
newing and  invigorating  rest.  In  fellow- 
ship with  Him  men  develop  a  sense  of 
poise,  of  balance,  and  of  adequacy  to  their 
tasks.  As  the  days  are  so  the  strength 
becomes. 

"Come  and  dine,"  He  said  on  one  occasion 
to  a  boatload  of  men.  They  were  cold,  for 
it  was  in  the  early  spring  when  the  wind 
blows  chill  across  the  Sea  of  Galilee.  They 
were  hungry,  for  they  had  been  fishing  all 
night.  They  were  discouraged,  for  that 
night  they  caught  nothing.  They  were  men 
who  had  been  unfaithful  to  duty.  The  leader 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  71 

of  the  group  had  turned  his  back  upon  his 
best  friend,  another  had  denied  the  truth  of 
that  friend's  statements,  and  they  had  all 
shown  themselves  unreliable.  In  that  hour 
when  they  were  cold,  hungry,  discouraged, 
and  at  fault,  Christ  went  to  them,  not  with 
words  of  denunciation  or  of  reproach — the 
word  upon  His  lips  was  one  of  gracious  in- 
vitation. "Come  and  dine,''  He  said,  point- 
ing to  the  fish  broiling  and  the  bread  toasting 
upon  the  bed  of  coals.  After  He  had  fed 
them  He  addressed  Himself  to  the  deeper 
needs  of  each  man,  saying,  "Lovest  thou 
me?''  And  when  He  had  won  a  satisfactory 
response.  He  sent  them  out  to  feed  the  sheep 
and  to  nurture  the  lambs  of  His  flock.  His 
first  word  to  that  boatload  of  discouraged 
men  was  a  word  of  gracious  invitation. 

I  need  not  cite  further  instances.  This  at- 
titude toward  human  need  runs  like  a  warm, 
red  thread  all  through  Christ's  message.  He 
was  steadily  inviting  the  movement  of  the 
individual  life  toward  that  which  is  central, 
fundamental,  vital.  He  was  one  who  had 
the  right  to  say  "Come."  When  we  take  the 
essential  qualities  of  His  life  and  hold  them 
sacred,  esteem  them  divine,  lift  them  to  the 


72      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

supreme  place  in  our  thought,  we  are  not 
misled.  If  any  man  has  seen  Him,  he  has 
seen  the  Father.  Here  was  one  who  could 
call  Himself  ''the  Son  of  Man,"  the  heir  of 
all  that  is  essentially  human,  the  epitome  of 
all  that  we  include  in  our  thought  of  man  in 
capacity  and  in  prospect. 

He  is  to-day  competent  to  stand  at  the  cen- 
ter of  the  whole  movement  for  moral  ad- 
vance and  say  ''Come."  We  never  find  Him 
pointing  men  away  from  Himself  as  the 
poets  and  the  prophets,  the  pastors  and  the 
evangelists,  are  wont  to  do.  He  says 
"Come,"  and  the  acceptance  of  that  invita- 
tion, the  movement  of  the  individual  life  to- 
ward Christ  in  thought,  in  aspiration,  in 
confidence,  and  in  the  habit  of  obedience,  be- 
comes inevitably  prophetic  of  the  highest 
good  known  to  human  experience. 

It  is  the  call  of  the  laboratory  method. 
The  scientific  man  does  not  stand  outside  the 
door  and  out  of  his  own  inner  consciousness 
or  from  the  hearsay  of  the  street  develop 
a  priori  theories  as  to  how  certain  chemicals 
or  certain  forms  of  life  should  act  and  react 
under  given  conditions.  He  goes  into  the 
laboratory  and,  taking  the  materials  into  his 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  73 

own  hands,  makes  experiments  for  himself. 
Then  he  knows — he  speaks  no  longer  from 
hearsay  or  in  speculation;  his  utterance  is 
grounded  in  actual  experience. 

The  scientific  man  in  religion  does  not 
view  the  subject  from  across  the  street,  or 
from  the  seat  of  the  scornful,  or  from  the 
last  pew  in  some  dimly  lighted  building.  He 
accepts  the  invitation  of  Christ  and  enters 
the  laboratory.  He  will  know  for  himself 
what  religion  may  be  made  to  mean  to  his 
own  inner  life.  He  moves  toward  that  which 
is  central,  fundamental,  and  vital  that  he 
may  experience  for  himself  the  necessary 
reactions. 

He  takes  the  four  Gospels  and  reads  them 
and  rereads  them.  He  gets  the  image  of 
that  life,  the  flavor  of  that  teaching,  the 
sense  of  the  influence  of  that  person  upon 
other  persons,  deep  down  into  his  own  inner 
consciousness.  He  seeks  to  imbibe  that  spirit 
and  to  reproduce  according  to  the  measure 
of  his  capacity  the  essential  qualities  of  that 
character,  and  to  experience  at  first  hand  the 
help  there  to  be  found  in  resisting  tempta- 
tion, in  mastering  difficulty,  in  bearing  bur- 
dens, and  in  standing  firm  in  the  path  of 


74      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

moral  obligation  when  it  is  not  the  line  of 
least  resistance.  He  is  not  speculating  or 
listening  to  hearsay;  he  is  making  experi- 
ments in  his  own  right. 

It  is  the  only  way  to  gain  that  knowledge 
of  the  truth  which  yields  power.  The  child 
learns  to  walk  not  by  hearing  lectures  on  the 
subject  but  by  walking,  with  many  a  faulty 
step  and  tumble.  The  boy  learns  to  speak  by 
speaking,  with  much  bad  syntax  and  ill-con- 
sidered rhetoric  at  first.  Men  learn  to  play 
golf  by  playing  golf,  with  bad  strokes  innu- 
merable at  the  start,  tearing  up  the  soil  and 
breaking  their  sticks,  that  the  later  satisfac- 
tion of  a  splendid  drive  may  be  theirs.  Men 
learn  to  know  the  presence  of  God  and  to 
enjoy  the  help  of  all  these  spiritual  realities 
by  practice.  The  best  of  anything  cannot  be 
adequately  described.  It  is  impossible  even 
to  frame  a  transcript  of  it  which  can  be 
handed  about  in  words.  It  must  be  experi- 
enced at  first  hand  in  order  to  be  known. 

You  may  recall  that  prison  scene  in  "Adam 
Bede."  Hetty  had  been  condemned  to  death 
for  the  murder  of  her  child  which  was  born 
in  shame.  She  was  to  be  executed  the  next 
day.    The  night  before,  Dinah  Morris,  a  re- 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  75 

ligious  mystic,  went  to  the  unfortunate  girl 
in  the  jail.  She  had  a  warm  heart  of  wo- 
manly sympathy  as  well  as  the  open  vision 
of  things  unseen.  The  guilty  woman  clung 
to  the  innocent  one  and  cried  like  a  child. 
"You  won't  leave  me,  Dinah.  You  '11  keep 
close  to  me."  "No,  Hetty,  I  will  not  leave 
you,  but  there  is  Some  One  else  in  this  cell 
besides  me — Some  One  close  to  you." 
"Who?"  replied  the  frightened  girl,  for  the 
cell  was  dark  and  Hetty's  eyes  were  holden. 
"Some  One  who  has  been  with  you  through 
all  your  hours  of  sin  and  struggle.  And  to- 
morrow, when  I  cannot  follow  you,  He  who 
is  with  us  now  will  be  with  you  then."  It 
was  a  strong,  clear  statement  of  spiritual 
reality,  but  it  was  all  Greek  to  poor  Hetty. 
Even  Dinah  Morris  could  not  convey  to  the 
inexperienced  soul  the  sense  of  the  divine 
presence.  The  great  things  in  life  cannot  be 
described — they  must  be  felt  at  first  hand. 
The  word  "come"  stands  of  necessity  in  the 
very  forefront  of  Christ's  message. 

The  somewhat  hackneyed  revival  appeal, 
"Come  to  Jesus,"  may  be  the  emptiest  sort 
of  phrase.  It  may  mean  only  the  light- 
hearted  adoption  of  a  certain  theological  the- 


ye      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

ory  according  to  which  the  acceptance  of  a 
certain  scheme  of  salvation  centering  in  Him' 
will  change  one's  eternal  destiny.  It  may  be 
only  a  sentimental  appeal,  not  addressed  to 
the  real  moral  nature  and  never  finding  the 
man's  will.  It  may  only  stir  those  emotions 
which  lie  near  the  surface  as  the  waters  in 
some  shallow  pool  are  stirred  to  their  depths 
by  every  passing  breeze. 

But,  rightly  understood,  that  well-worn  in- 
vitation, "Come  to  Christ,"  may  have  tre- 
mendous significance.  It  may  mean  the  gath- 
ering up  and  the  organization  of  all  the 
materials  of  one's  life  into  a  Christian  system 
of  activities  and  the  directing  of  them  to  cer- 
tain moral  ends  which  find  their  highest  his- 
torical manifestation  in  Him.  It  may  mean 
the  high  resolve  to  so  direct  all  the  energies 
of  one's  being  toward  that  quality  of  man- 
hood found  in  Him  as  to  make  the  whole  life 
a  quest  for  sound  and  reliable  health,  for 
mental  clearness  and  efficiency,  for  moral 
vigor,  and  for  the  fine  spirit  of  unselfish  de- 
votion. If  those  words  are  given  their  full 
content,  then  it  is  a  majestic  summons.  And 
that  great  word  *'come,"  the  movement  of 
the  inner  life  toward  that  which  is  central. 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  ^7 

fundamental,  and  vital,  is  the  first  key-word 
in  the  Gospel. 

The  second  great  word  in  the  Christian 
message  is  the  word  "Follow.'^  It  under- 
takes to  make  the  continuous  movement  of 
the  life  an  advance  along  lines  not  identical 
but  rather  parallel  with  the  line  of  movement 
in  His  own  life.  He  found  men  fishing. 
"Follow  me,"  He  said,  ''and  I  will  make  you 
fishers  of  men."  He  would  utilize  the  capac- 
ity developed  in  that  familiar,  accustomed 
toil  for  the  gaining  of  higher  ends.  He 
would  make  them  competent  to  take  and  hold 
this  finer  form  of  value.  In  the  familiar 
terms  of  their  own  calling,  by  a  new  use  of 
those  very  faculties  by  which  they  had  been 
earning  their  bread,  He  would  transform 
their  function  in  society  into  something 
of  vastly  greater  worth. 

He  would  render  them  able  to  ''launch  out 
into  the  deep,"  into  thoughts,  aspirations, 
and  activities  which  lie  far  below  the  surface. 
He  would  send  them  out  beyond  the  shallows 
where  they  had  been  investing  their  strength, 
and  there  they  would  be  made  competent  to 
do  business  in  great  waters.  Thus  they 
would  find  themselves  able  to  offer  better  re- 


78      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

turns  from  their  labor  to  meet  the  needs  of 
their  fellows.  ''Follow  me,"  He  said,  "and 
I  will  make  you  effective  on  deeper  levels  of 
being." 

He  was  orderly  in  His  procedure.  It  meant 
much,  as  we  have  already  seen,  for  a  life  to 
come  to  Him  in  genuine  fashion.  It  would 
mean  still  more  for  that  life  to  follow,  to 
face  in  the  direction  where  He  faced,  to 
keep  step  with  Him  in  the  advance  made 
toward  a  great  fulfillment,  to  feel  itself  a 
living,  moving  part  of  the  vast  spiritual  en- 
terprise which  bears  His  name.  The  soul  of 
the  individual  enters  into  its  essential  dignity 
by  holding  such  an  attitude  toward  God,  by 
being  found  in  such  relations  to  other  lives, 
by  maintaining  such  a  personal  bearing  in 
its  own  profounder  aspirations  as  always  to 
be  counted  in  as  a  "follower"  when  the  Chris- 
tian forces  are  reckoned  up.  The  word  "fol- 
low" is  a  term  of  great  significance  in  the 
Christian  message. 

When  the  rich  young  rule^  came  to  Christ 
asking  what  he  should  do  to  inherit  eternal 
life,  Jesus,  knowing  the  unutilized  potencies 
of  that  well-endowed,  well-equipped  life,  said 
to  him  frankly,  "Sell  and  give  and  follow 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  79 

me."  The  young  ruler  was  directed  to 
make  it  the  habit  of  his  life  to  translate 
holdings  into  impartings.  He  was  to  con- 
vert possession  into  service.  He  was  to 
do  this  not  merely  in  the  coarser,  easier 
matter  of  giving  money,  but  in  the  use  of  all 
those  qualities  of  mind  and  heart  which 
caused  Jesus  to  love  him  as  He  looked  upon 
him. 

Sell  and  give  and  follow  Him !  This  was 
to  be  the  general  method.  "H  any  man  will 
come  after  me,  let  him  deny  himself,  and  take 
up  his  cross,"— not  "my  cross,"  but  "his 
cross,"  which  might  involve  sacrifice  of  an 
entirely  different  sort  from  that  witnessed 
on  Calvary !  "Let  him  deny  himself,  and  take 
up  his  cross,  and  follow."  In  ordinary  prac- 
tice the  Christian  man  must  be  faced  as 
Christ  was,  making  it  the  rule  of  his  life  to 
subordinate  the  small  things  to  the  great, 
personal  gratification  to  a  higher  usefulness. 
Thus  he  mingles  and  blends  his  own  indi- 
vidual energies  in  his  particular  field  with 
those  of  the  Eternal  Spirit  who  goes  every- 
where, not  to  be  ministered  unto  but  to  min- 
ister and  to  give  itself  for  the  moral  recovery 
of  many. 


8o      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

In  the  face  of  this  moral  imperative  to  be 
faced  right  and  to  be  moving  in  the  same 
general  direction  w^ith  the  highest  we  know, 
Christ  brushed  aside  a  great  many  things  as 
unimportant  and  irrelevant.  When  His  dis- 
ciples began  to  speculate  as  to  what  this  man 
should  do  and  what  that  man  should  do,  as 
to  what  would  happen  to  them  in  the  next 
fifty  years,  or  as  to  the  possibility  of  some 
one  tarrying  on  earth  until  Christ  should 
come  again,  Jesus  said  to  one  of  them  almost 
sharply,  ''What  is  that  to  thee?  Follow  thou 
me/' 

You  can  ask  a  thousand  questions  in  as 
many  minutes  which  do  not  admit  of  any 
immediate  and  final  answer.  You  can  find 
a  thousand  people  who  are  not  doing  their 
duty  as  you  may  conceive  of  duty.  You  can 
pile  up  around  you  queries  and  problems  of 
a  religious  sort  until  you  stand  in  them  chin- 
deep  and  helpless.  What  is  all  that  to  you, 
if  you  are  not  following  the  best  you  have 
ever  seen  or  heard  or  felt  as  in  any  wise  pos- 
sible to  you?  This  obligation  is  fundamental. 

It  was  the  transparent  honesty  of  the  au- 
thor of  that  little  book  "In  His  Steps"  or, 
"What  Would  Jesus  Do?"  rather  than  any 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  8i 

special  literary  skill  which  carried  it  up  to  a 
circulation  of  something  like  two  millions  of 
copies.  The  author  took  the  words  of  Christ 
seriously  and  endeavored  to  apply  them  di- 
rectly to  the  needs  of  modern  life.  The  ethi- 
cal soundness  of  his  main  contention,  how- 
ever, may  be  questioned. 

"In  His  steps"— not  always!  Our  lines 
of  life  may  lie  parallel  with  His,  but  they 
may  not  be  identical.  We  may  be  called  to 
traverse  certain  fields  of  activity  which  He 
never  entered.  In  that  case  we  shall  be  mak- 
ing steps  of  our  own— it  may  be  toward  the 
same  general  goal.  The  letter  of  slavish  imi- 
tation would  kill  many  useful  and  necessary 
forms  of  activity  where  the  spirit  of  a  pur- 
pose thoroughly  sympathetic  with  His  would 
serve  to  make  those  activities  more  com- 
pletely and  usefully  alive. 

By  simply  reading  these  brief,  discon- 
nected narratives  we  do  not  know  exactly 
what  Jesus  would  do  under  modern  condi- 
tions. He  never  married— most  of  us  live  or 
are  to  live  in  family  relations.  He  was  never 
engaged  in  any  trade  or  business  during  the 
period  covered  by  these  narratives— most 
men  and  women  are  compelled  to  give  the 


82      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

bulk  of  their  time  and  strength  to  some  secu- 
lar occupation.  He  seems  to  have  owned  no 
property;  we  never  read  of  His  giving 
money  to  any  one  although  He  was  con- 
stantly surrounded  by  human  need.  With  us 
the  right  use  of  money  is  one  of  the  most 
serious  obligations  of  the  moral  life.  He  was 
the  subject  of  a  monarchy  which  ruled  His 
native  province  in  arbitrary  fashion,  allow- 
ing the  people  no  privileges  of  participation 
in  civic  affairs,  while  we  are  the  responsible 
citizens  of  a  free  Republic.  We  cannot,  if 
we  would,  follow  in  His  steps  because  the 
work  cut  out  for  us  carries  us  of  necessity 
into  paths  He  never  trod.  We  can  ''follow" 
in  the  sense  of  facing  squarely  the  great 
imperatives  which  ruled  His  life  and  in  seek- 
ing to  reproduce  the  spiritual  quality  of  His 
service  in  terms  of  our  own  employment. 

The  third  word  introduces  a  new  and  more 
dynamic  element.  Christianity  is  not  a  more 
searching  code  of  commandments  than  that 
associated  with  Sinai ;  it  is  not  a  mere  system 
of  ethics  more  perfect  than  those  of  Confu- 
cius. It  does  not  aim  merely  to  induce  men 
to  keep  a  better  devised  set  of  rules  than 
were  ever  known  before.     It  is  a  gospel 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  83 

rather  than  a  code.  It  is  not  legal,  it  is  evan- 
gelical. In  its  whole  method  the  emphasis  is 
placed  upon  inwardness.  It  provides  for  a 
naturalness,  a  spontaneity,  a  sense  of  liberty, 
and  an  abiding  joy,  which  hard  and  fast 
obedience  to  the  best  code  attainable  would 
never  secure.  Therefore,  the  third  great 
word  in  the  Christian  message  is  the  term 
"Abide."  This  summons  points  to  that  sense 
of  vital  union  between  the  human  and  the 
divine  which  is  secured  by  a  deeper  experi- 
ence of  reality. 

"Abide  in  me  and  I  in  you,"  He  said  in 
that  supreme  hour  in  the  upper  room.  "The 
branch  cannot  bear  fruit  of  itself,  except  it 
abide  in  the  vine— no  more  can  ye."  It  is 
only  when  the  branch  maintains  an  unbroken 
and  vital  sense  of  union  with  the  parent  vine 
that  it  bears  fruit.  By  that  sense  of  union 
it  bears  fruit  night  and  day,  it  scarce  knows 
how.  The  mighty  vine  lays  hold  of  the  uni- 
versal forces,  the  soil  and  the  sunshine,  the 
rain  and  the  dew,  and  then  it  sends  the  pulsa- 
tions of  its  own  energy  into  every  branch 
and  the  branch  bears  fruit.  Cut  the  branch 
off,  allow  it  to  cut  itself  off,  were  it  possessed 
of  this  power  through  some  opposing  will  of 


84      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

its  own,  and  its  ability  to  expand,  to  bear 
fruit,  to  live  at  all,  would  be  gone.  No  more 
can  men  live,  expand,  and  bear  fruit  as  they 
were  meant  to  do,  except  they  abide  in  Him. 

"If  ye  abide  in  me,  and  my  words  abide  in 
you,''  as  settled  principles  of  action,  as  deter- 
mining ideals,  "ye  shall  ask  .  .  .  and  it  shall 
be  done."  The  upthrust  of  your  life  in  re- 
quest, the  outreach  of  it  in  service  will  ac- 
complish your  desire.  You  will  go  forth 
with  the  strength  of  ten  because  your  heart 
is  pure  and  your  aspiration  true  through  that 
sense  of  union  with  Him. 

A  single  grain  of  dust  at  the  point  of  con- 
tact will  turn  back  a  current  of  electricity 
and  leave  the  room  dark  or  withhold  power 
from  the  machine.  A  single  grain  of  con- 
scious, wilful,  deliberate  evil  at  the  point  of 
contact  between  the  soul  of  man  and  the 
Spirit  of  the  Eternal  will  defeat  the  benefi- 
cent purpose  of  the  Master.  Abide  in  Him; 
keep  the  way  open,  the  point  of  contact  clear, 
the  sense  of  union  real,  and  your  whole 
moral  effort  will  be  made  effective. 

I  said  at  the  outset  that  the  four  great 
words  were  addressed  mainly  to  the  will; 
that  they  involved  action.  This  word  "abide" 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  85 

may  seem  to  have  reference  rather  to  a  pas- 
sive and  quiescent  attitude.  But  it  is  a  liv- 
ing, moving,  accompHshing  Christ  with 
whom  we  have  to  do.  When  His  spirit  would 
advance  with  you  to  that  higher  mode  of  life 
for  which  you  were  intended,  you  cannot 
"abide"  if  you  lag  behind.  When  He  would 
summon  you  to  some  nobler  service  and  ally 
Himself  with  you  more  profoundly  in  the 
rendering  of  it,  you  cannot  "abide"  if  you 
decline  that  service.  The  kingdom  of  God  is 
"a  going  concern";  it  is  not  static,  it  is  a 
thing  of  life.  The  man  who  walks  with  God 
must  keep  moving.  His  inner  life  cannot  be 
static ;  it  must  advance,  keeping  step  with  the 
divine  purpose.  If  you  would  abide,  you  will 
be  compelled  to  act  steadily  and  nobly. 

It  is  in  the  maintenance  of  this  sense  of 
union  with  the  Eternal  that  prayer  finds  what 
is  to  me  its  greatest  value.  I  believe  in  prayer 
because  I  believe  in  God.  If  I  can  hear,  He 
can.  If  I  can  make  reply,  He  has  the  same 
power.  If  I  wish  to  make  reply  when  my 
child  speaks,  how  much  more  shall  He,  the 
perfect  moral  being. 

I  believe  in  prayer  because  Christ  be- 
lieved in  it.     He  was  too  wise  to  waste  His 


86      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


time  uselessly.  He  spent  whole  nights  in 
prayer.  He  had  more  to  say  about  prayer 
than  any  other  one  whose  words  stand  re- 
corded in  holy  writ.  It  is  significant  that  the 
perfect  man  was  thus  a  man  of  prayer.  Hu- 
manity at  its  best  prays.  When  men  for- 
sake the  example  of  Christ,  thinking  they  can 
do  better,  they  go  farther  and  fare  worse. 
It  is  so  regarding  this  habit  of  prayer. 

I  believe  in  prayer  because  of  what  I  see 
when  I  turn  to  the  long  and  broad  lines  of 
human  experience.  Men  always  have  prayed 
— it  seems  to  be  one  of  the  persistent  habits 
of  our  race.  The  fact  that  it  is  so  wide- 
spread and  has  so  long  endured  indicates  that 
it  has  utility.  When  you  find  a  fin  on  a  fish 
or  a  wing  on  a  bird,  or  what  is  popularly 
known  as  an  "instinct"  in  an  animal,  you 
know  that  it  has  some  use  or  it  would  not  be 
there.  Useless  organs  disappear  or  become 
rudimentary.  The  very  persistence  of  this 
habit  of  prayer  raises  a  strong  presumption 
that  such  an  exercise  of  one's  powers  is  both 
rational  and  useful. 

With  this  persistent  habit  of  the  race  in 
mind  it  is  instructive  to  recall  the  testimony 
of  a  distinguished  evolutionist.     In  his  little 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  87 

book,  "Through  Nature  to  God,"  John  Fiske 
says  that  in  nature  we  have  found  it  to  be 
true  that  "Everywhere  the  internal  adjust- 
ment has  been  brought  about  so  as  to  har- 
monize with  some  actually  existing  external 
fact.  The  eye  was  developed  in  response  to 
the  outward  existence  of  radiant  light,  the 
ear  in  response  to  the  outward  existence  of 
acoustic  vibrations,  the  mother's  love  came 
in  response  to  the  infant's  needs.  If  the  re- 
lation established  in  the  morning  twilight  of 
man's  existence  between  the  human  soul  and 
a  world  invisible  and  immaterial  is  a  relation 
of  which  only  the  subjective  term  is  real  and 
the  objective  term  is  non-existent,  then,  I 
say,  it  is  something  utterly  without  precedent 
in  the  whole  history  of  creation."  If  the 
capacity  of  man  for  fellowship  with  God 
through  prayer  were  real  only  at  our  end  of 
the  line  and  unreal  at  the  other,  then  it  would 
be  an  utter  break  in  the  whole  method  dis- 
covered in  the  ascertained  uniformities  of 
nature.  "The  lesson  of  evolution  therefore 
is  that  through  all  these  weary  ages  the  hu- 
man soul  has  not  been  cherishing  in  religion 
a  delusive  phantom,  but  in  spite  of  seemingly 
endless  groping  and  stumbling,  it  has  been 


88      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

rising  to  the  recognition  of  its  essential  kin- 
ship with  the  ever-Hving  God." 

But  when  I  would  find  the  deepest  assur- 
ances as  to  the  value  and  efficacy  of  prayer, 
I  look  within.  The  heart  is  renewed,  the 
affections  are  purified,  the  aspirations  are 
lifted  higher,  the  lame  wiU  is  made  strong, 
and  the  immediate  sense  of  union  with  the 
invisible  spirit  of  good,  that  is  to  say  of  God, 
is  deepened  by  prayer. 

This  I  know  as  I  know  that  fire  burns,  that 
water  slakes  thirst,  that  good  food  satisfies 
hunger  and  renews  strength.  I  am  not  specu- 
lating nor  speaking  from  hearsay;  I  come  to 
you  with  knowledge  gained  by  the  laboratory 
method.  I  would  not  limit  the  value  of 
prayer  to  its  ascertainable  reactions  upon  the 
life  of  the  man  who  prays.  While  I  feel  the 
incompleteness  of  my  knowledge  touching 
any  final  philosophy  as  to  the  precise  way  in 
which  the  finite  will  becomes  co-laborer  with 
the  Infinite  Will  in  the  shaping  of  outward 
events,  I  have  confidence  that  it  is  so.  But 
these  experiences  of  personal  benefit  in  those 
blessed  and  persistent  reactions  which  are 
constantly  coming  to  the  soul  of  the  man  who 
offers  genuine  and  expectant  prayer  as  one 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  89 

of  the  normal  expressions  of  his  deeper  self, 
are  clear  beyond  any  peradventure. 

In  these  days  when  we  stand  amazed  at 
the  results  accomplished  by  certain  invisible 
forces,  the  Roentgen  ray,  wireless  telegra- 
phy, the  bearing  of  mental  suggestion  upon 
the  healing  of  functional  disease,  we  should 
not  be  reluctant  or  grudging  in  our  judgment 
as  to  the  possible  efficacy  of  prayer.  It  was 
not  a  recluse,  a  pietist,  or  even  a  clergyman, 
it  was  a  man  trained  as  a  chemist  and  for 
forty  years  the  distinguished  president  of 
Harvard  University — it  was  President  Eliot 
who  said,  "Prayer  is  the  transcendent  effort 
of  human  intelligence."  He  felt  that  a  man 
stands  in  his  noblest  attitude  before  God 
when  he  summons  the  best  that  is  in  him  into 
action  and  bends  all  the  energy  of  affection 
and  will  toward  the  attainment  of  some  holy 
end  through  prayer.  It  is  a  force  to  be  reck- 
oned with  in  this  world  where  the  unseen 
so  often  lords  it  over  the  seen.  It  would  be 
difficult  to  picture  our  human  nature  as  en- 
tering more  fully  by  any  act  into  the  sense  of 
its  own  surpassing  dignity  and  worth. 

We  need  not  be  disturbed  by  the  fact  that 
we  have   not   reduced   the   possibilities   of 


90      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

prayer,  to  be  realized  within  and  not  in  de- 
fiance of  the  great  uniformities  of  God,  to 
an  exact  science.  We  have  not  reduced  to 
anything  Hke  an  exact  science  the  influence 
of  a  mother's  love  upon  her  children,  or  the 
effect  of  a  good  name  upon  a  man's  prospects 
of  success,  or  the  physical  benefits  of  a  cheer- 
ful habit  of  mind.  We  have  not  reduced  to 
an  exact  science  the  forces  at  work  in  a 
wheat  field— they  are  too  intricate  for  hu- 
man intelligence.  Perfect  intelligence  could 
determine  in  advance  just  how  many  grains 
of  wheat  in  each  bushel  cast  into  the  soil 
would  grow  and  exactly  what  the  harvest 
would  be,  but  no  man  can  tell.  Perfect  intel- 
ligence could  tell  why  certain  prayers  seem 
to  succeed  and  others  fail,  but  such  complete 
intelligence  regarding  all  the  forces  to  be 
considered  is  not  within  our  reach. 

But  even  though  in  all  these  fields  our 
knowledge  stops  far  short  of  completeness, 
enough  is  known  to  encourage  continued  ef- 
fort. Mothers  love  their  children;  a  right- 
minded  man  guards  his  good  name ;  sensible 
people  promote  health  by  good  cheer;  and 
farmers  continue  to  sow  their  wheat  in  con- 
fidence that  they  will  reap.    In  like  manner, 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  91 

thoughtful  people  keep  on  praying,  assured 
by  the  words  and  the  example  of  Christ ;  and 
still  further  assured  by  an  ever-increasing 
volume  of  religious  experience,  that  prayer 
works  out  its  own  beneficent  results.  And 
one  of  the  most  beneficent  results  lies  in  that 
maintenance  of  a  sense  of  union  between  the 
human  and  the  divine. 

"Abide  in  me !"  You  are  not  alone  in  the 
quest  for  character,  in  the  desire  to  serve 
your  own  generation,  in  the  wish  to  grow 
toward  your  own  completeness.  You  are  not 
alone— the  Father  is  with  you.  You  may  be 
walking  some  busy  street,  or  grappling  with 
some  intellectual  problem,  or  facing  a  room 
full  of  restless  pupils,  or  fighting  hard  in 
some  inward  moral  conflict — it  matters  not, 
the  Father  is  with  you  and  by  the  habit  of 
prayer  you  may  come  to  maintain  unbrokenly 
that  sense  of  sweet  and  exalted  fellowship 
which  brings  a  mighty  sense  of  reinforce- 
ment to  all  your  powers  as  you  learn  how  to 
abide. 

The  fourth  great  word  in  the  Christian 
message  is  the  word  "Go";  it  indicates  that 
all  these  finer  experiences  are  to  find  expres- 
sion in  far-reaching  action.     It  looks  out 


92      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

with  eager  expectation  upon  the  broad  field 
of  kindly  and  competent  service. 

Jesus  says  to  every  obedient  man  at  a  cer- 
tain stage  of  his  experience,  "Come,"  and  the 
man  comes;  and  at  another  stage  He  says, 
''Go,"  and  the  man  goes.  ''Go  home  to  thy 
friends,  and  tell  them  how  great  things  the 
Lord  hath  done  for  thee."  "Go  work  .  .  . 
in  my  vineyard."  "Go  to  the  lost  sheep  of 
the  house  of  Israel"— they  were  sent  first  to 
men  of  their  own  race  and  nation.  "Go,"  He 
said  at  last,  "ye  into  all  the  world,  and  make 
known  the  good  news  to  every  creature." 
And  straightway  His  followers  went  out 
teaching  men  whatsoever  He  had  com- 
manded them,  enrolling  them  as  disciples 
under  the  tuition  of  a  nobler  method  of  life, 
and  washing  their  lives  clean  as  they  bap- 
tized them  into  that  name  which  stands  for 
the  manifold  helpfulness  of  God. 

The  experience  which  had  been  deepened, 
enriched,  and  matured  by  coming  to  Him,  by 
that  movement  toward  what  is  central; 
which  had  been  developed  by  following,  by 
facing  all  its  activities  in  harmony  with  the 
great  advance  for  which  He  stood;  which 
had  been  steadied  and  reassured  by  its  sense 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  93 

of  union,  was  now  to  find  fuller  expression 
in  moving  out  upon  all  the  fields  of  service  it 
mighfadequately  cover.    It  was  to  "go." 

Impression  must  precede  expression  else 
there  would  be  nothing  to  express.  The  in- 
take must  come  first  in  order  that  there  may 
be  a  store  to  draw  upon  when  we  would  give. 
But  unless  the  cycle  completes  itself,  the  life 
enriched  by  the  profounder  experiences  I 
have  been  discussing  finding  its  outlet  in 
wholesome  usefulness,  there  will  be  stagna- 
tion and  death. 

'Treely  ye  have  received''— and  then  be- 
cause the  life  was  enriched  by  what  it  had 
received,  the  other  words  inevitably  follow — 
"freely  give."  If  the  last  injunction  is  dis- 
regarded, it  is  only  a  question  of  time  until 
the  capacity  to  freely  receive  will  be  gone.  I 
shall  speak  in  a  later  address  more  directly 
touching  this  whole  matter  of  service  and  I 
simply  refer  to  it  here.  But  this  word  ''go" 
indicates  that  every  life  must  develop  by  find- 
ing expression  in  useful  activity. 

These  are  the  four  great  words  of  the 
Christian  message.  Come,  Follow,  Abide,  Go. 
What  more  is  there  to  be  said  than  is  here 
suggested    when    we    group    these    words 


94      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

around  the  commanding  figure  of  one  who 
has  taken  the  moral  government  and  leader- 
ship of  the  world  upon  His  shoulder  as  none 
other  ever  has  ?    They  cover  the  ground. 

They  indeed  represent  a  certain  cycle  of 
experience.  The  last  comes  back  upon  the 
first.  The  command  to  "go"  does  not  mean 
that  the  man  ceases  to  "come''  or  to  "follow'' 
or  to  "abide."  It  does  not  involve  for  a  mo- 
ment any  separation  of  his  life  from  the 
source  of  the  original  impulse,  but  only  a 
closer  union.  Men  came  to  Christ,  absorbed 
His  spirit,  were  made  ready  to  follow,  be- 
came strong  through  abiding  in  His  love  and 
then  they  went  out  into  all  the  world  to  re- 
produce His  influence  according  to  the  meas- 
ure of  their  ability.  And,  lo!  they  found 
that  He  was  with  them  more  than  ever  and 
would  be  always,  even  unto  the  consumma- 
tion of  the  age.  Come,  follow,  abide,  go— 
they  form  a  perfect  cycle ! 

When  Christ  stood  at  the  well,  listening  to 
the  rude  banter  of  the  woman  who  was 
amused  because  a  Jew  asked  a  Samaritan  for 
a  drink,  when  the  Jews  had  no  dealings  with 
the  Samaritans,  He  suddenly  recalled  her  to 
the  tragedy  of  her  own  situation  by  saying, 
"If  thou  knewest  the  gift  of  God,  .  .  .  thou 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  95 


wouldst  ask."  There  she  was,  face  to  face 
with  the  greatest  spiritual  opportunity  which 
had  ever  come  to  her  unfortunate  hfe.  If 
she  had  eyes  to  see,  she  could  look  into  the 
face  of  the  Eternal.  If  she  had  ears  to  hear, 
she  could  hear  some  of  the  noblest  words 
which  ever  fell  from  human  lips.  If  she  had 
the  will  for  it,  she  might  drink  the  water  of 
life  freely. 

But  she  was  blind  and  deaf  to  all  this  at 
the  outset.  The  well  was  deep  and  in  her 
poor  understanding  of  the  finer  things  in  life 
she  had  nothing  to  draw  with.  She  spent 
those  moments  in  idle  banter  and  in  quibbles 
about  theology,  discussing  the  contention  be- 
tween the  Jews  and  the  Samaritans  as  to  the 
proper  place  w^here  men  ought  to  worship. 
"If  thou  knewest  the  gift  of  God,''  Jesus 
said,  "thou  wouldst  ask."  The  deeper  expe- 
riences of  life  were  there  within  reach,  but 
she  was  neglecting  them. 

The  indictment  which  will  be  brought 
against  many  of  the  men  and  women  in  our 
own  day,  I  feel,  will  not  be  that  they  were  so 
dull  and  stupid  as  not  to  know  of  anything 
better  than  the  weak,  thin,  flat  lives  many  of 
them  are  living.  This  is  not  the  fact.  They 
all  realize  in  some  moment  of  thoughtfulness 


96      THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

that  there  is  something  better  than  this  poor 
quahty  of  being  they  habitually  show.  Some 
of  them  in  earlier  years  were  living  lives 
more  worthy  of  their  best  powers.  Some  of 
them  still  find  their  hearts  hungry  for 
righteousness  and  their  souls  athirst  for  the 
living  God.  But  they  have  been  thrown  into 
intellectual  confusion  perhaps  by  certain 
modern  conceptions  which  are  dominant,  and 
they  have  not  taken  the  time  to  readjust  and 
to  straighten  it  all  out.  Some  of  them,  by 
the  sharp  pace  of  modern  life  and  the  appar- 
ent necessity  for  giving  attention  to  so  many 
interests,  have  allowed  the  deeper  things  to 
be  crowded  out  and  thrust  to  one  side.  Thus 
they  have  allowed  themselves  to  slip  back  in 
their  own  ideals,  habits,  and  resolves.  They 
have  become  listless  where  they  should  be 
spiritually  energetic.  They  lack  the  dispo- 
sition to  ask  and  to  act  in  such  a  way  as  to 
possess  themselves  of  the  best  gifts  of  God. 

In  that  high  hour  when  Christ  met  His 
disciples  for  the  last  interview  in  the  upper 
room  He  wished  to  bestow  upon  them  a  new, 
a  more  potent,  and  a  more  truly  inward  equip- 
ment for  their  work.  He  had  shown  them  in 
His   own  life  a  matchless  example  which 


A  DEEPENING  EXPERIENCE  97 

would  never  fade  out  of  their  minds.  He 
had  given  them  His  own  exalted  teachings 
and  neither  they  nor  we  will  ever  forget  how 
He  spake  as  never  man  spake  touching  the 
deep  things  of  life.  But  now  He  would  give 
them  that  without  which  His  example  and 
His  teaching  would  be  comparatively  un- 
fruitful. 

He  drew  them  around  Him  in  intimate  fel- 
lowship and  ''breathed  upon  them/'  as  if  He 
would  impart  unto  them  life  out  of  His  own 
more  abundant  store  of  life.  And  as  He  did 
this  He  said,  "Receive  ye  the  Holy  Spirit." 
The  word  He  used  for  ''receive"  indicated  no 
mere  passive  attitude  on  their  part.  It  was 
the  Greek  word  "lambano,"  which  means 
"take."  By  your  own  active  faith,  by  the 
clasp  and  retention  of  your  own  high  resolve, 
by  the  insistent  claim  of  your  deepest  self, 
"take"  this  deeper  experience  of  the  divine 
help !  This  is  the  method  by  which  that  gift 
of  God  is  ever  to  be  received.  It  comes  in 
response  to  the  spirit  of  initiative  on  our 
part.  And  it  comes  to  lead  our  minds  into 
all  truth  and  our  hearts  into  an  ever-deepen- 
ing experience. 


IV 

THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE 

IN  that  well-known  vision  recorded  in  the 
last  book  in  the  Bible  a  mighty  angel  ap- 
peared. He  was  clothed  with  a  cloud.  He 
wore  a  rainbow  on  his  head.  His  face  shone 
like  the  sun  because  of  the  radiant  interest 
he  felt  in  the  work  he  was  called  to  do.  He 
stood  ready  for  the  widest  usefulness,  his 
right  foot  upon  the  land  and  his  left  foot 
upon  the  sea. 

And  in  his  hand,  as  the  main  instrument 
of  his  power,  as  the  chief  agent  by  which  he 
was  to  accomplish  the  moral  ends  he  had  in 
view,  he  held,  not  the  sword  of  military  con- 
quest, not  the  coin  of  a  far-reaching  com- 
merce, not  the  swinging  censer  of  some  po- 
tent ecclesiasticism  casting  its  spell  upon  the 
hearts  of  men  by  the  use  of  ceremony— he 
held  in  his  hand  a  little  book,  open.  He  ex- 
pected to  achieve  the  results  he  had  in  mind 

98 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE     99 


by  the  instruction,  the  persuasion,  and  the 
moral  appeal  of  the  truth. 

You  can  hardly  find  a  more  suggestive 
picture  of  the  general  method  of  this  century 
in  which  we  live,  or  a  clearer  indication  as  to 
our  main  reliance,  than  this  ancient  picture 
where  the  messenger  from  on  high  came 
upon  the  scene  holding  in  his  hand  a  little 
book,  open. 

We  do  not  know  what  kind  of  a  book  it 
was— the  narrative  does  not  state.  I  have  a 
feeling,  however,  that  in  all  probability  it 
was  not  a  trigonometry.  It  was  undoubtedly 
a  good  book ;  it  was  probably  the  best  book 
on  which  the  angel  could  lay  his  hand.  It 
was  certainly  a  book  calculated  to  relate  it- 
self in  definite  fashion  to  the  needs  of  human 
life.  This  fact  of  itself  gives  us  a  significant 
hint. 

It  was  a  little  book,  not  a  ponderous  tome 
repelling  the  ordinary  reader  by  its  size ;  not 
a  musty,  leather  bound  octavo,  so  laden  with 
ancient  erudition  as  to  be  of  interest  only  to 
some  specialist  with  technical  training.  It 
was  a  volume  convenient  to  hold,— he  had  it 
in  his  hand.  It  was  a  book  readily  accessible 
to   those   who,    from    compulsion   or    from 


loo    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

choice,  measure  out  the  time  allotted  to  that 
sort  of  reading  sparingly.  It  was,  thus,  a 
book  within  the  compass  of  the  average 
interest. 

It  was  a  book  not  nearly  so  large,  I  fancy, 
as  that  complete  volume  which  contains  all 
the  canonical  scriptures  of  the  Old  and  New 
Testaments.  The  ordinary  Bible  with  its 
sixty-six  separate  books  could  hardly  be 
called  "a  little  book."  This  more  compact 
volume  which  the  angel  held  in  his  hand  as 
he  made  his  approach  to  the  moral  life  of  the 
race  comprised,  perhaps,  only  the  more  vital 
and  essential  elements  in  the  scriptures.  It 
presented  these  elements  standing  out  clear 
and  free  from  those  ancient  and  partial  re- 
mainders which  for  busy  people  have  only  a 
remote  historical  interest.  The  little  book 
contained,  we  may  believe,  a  compact  state- 
ment of  spiritual  realities  freed  from  the  in- 
evitable deposits  left  by  the  ruder  practices 
of  antiquity,  and  freed  from  those  local  and 
temporary  elements  which  must  of  necessity 
recede  through  the  gradual  cancellation 
wrought  by  the  process  of  spiritual  develop- 
ment. You  may  say  that  this  little  book 
might  represent  to  us  the  net  result  of  that 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    loi 

wise,  patient,  and  discriminating-  scholarship 
which  undertakes  to  set  forth  in  briefer  com- 
pass and  in  clearer  phrase  God's  message  to 
our  race. 

The  little  book  was  open,  wide  open.  It 
invited  on  the  face  of  it  the  fullest,  freest 
scrutiny  of  its  actual  contents.  There  was 
to  be  no  peeping  nor  squinting  in  the  study 
of  it ;  no  hiding  of  the  seat  of  intelligence  in 
the  sand,  ostrich  fashion,  under  the  vain  pre- 
tense that  no  difficulties  had  confronted  the 
men  who  had  undertaken  the  hard  task  of 
discovering  and  bringing  out  the  divine  mes- 
sage in  that  varying  literature  composed  by 
authors  so  widely  removed  in  time,  in  tem- 
perament, and  in  task. 

In  the  gradual  compilation  of  this  little 
book  from  the  best  to  be  found  in  that  larger 
literature  of  sixty-six  books,  which  taken  as 
a  whole  averaged  lower  in  actual  worth,  the 
defective  moralities  and  imperfect  insights 
which  belong  naturally  to  the  raw  period  of 
any  people's  history,  had  been  faced  frankly 
and  then  fearlessly  relegated  to  the  back- 
ground even  though  they  were  found  pref- 
aced by  a  "Thus  saith  the  Lord." 

The  drift  toward  form  and  legalism  from 


102    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

which  not  even  that  people  chosen  for  its 
spiritual  primacy  among  the  nations  had 
been  free,  had  been  appraised  and  accorded 
its  rightful  significance.  The  law  of  growth 
according  to  which  neither  mountains  nor 
valleys,  rivers  nor  forests,  languages  nor  in- 
stitutions nor  religions  ever  spring  suddenly 
into  being  by  some  arbitrary  and  omnipotent 
''Let  there  be,"— this  law  of  growth  had  been 
fully  recognized.  And  now  with  the  out- 
come of  this  patient,  discriminating  study  at 
his  command  the  divine  messenger  stood, 
well  equipped  for  moral  service  on  sea  and 
land,  with  that  vital,  usable  element  of  holy 
writ  held  in  his  hand  as  a  little  book,  wide 
open. 

I  am  speaking  here  in  parables  as  you  are 
all  aware.  I  am  claiming  a  full  measure  of 
that  liberty  which  goes  with  this  particular 
literary  form.  In  more  direct  phrase,  I 
might  say  that  in  our  Bible  we  have  a  heav- 
enly treasure.  But  we  find  that  treasure 
shaped  and  restricted  by  the  fact  that  it  is 
contained  and  entangled  in  a  curiously 
wrought  earthen  vessel.  The  treasure  itself 
is  sufficient  to  make  men  wise  unto  salvation 
and  to  furnish  them  thoroughly  for  all  sorts 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    103 

of  good  work,  but  it  lies  securely,  and  some- 
times obscurely,  imbedded  in  a  genuinely  his- 
torical process. 

In  that  this  process  is  historical,  rather 
than  a  magical  something  lying  to  one  side 
and  lacking  all  connection  with  other  move- 
ments of  thought  and  life  in  that  period 
when  it  made  its  appearance,  the  shameful 
immoralities  of  Lot  and  Samson,  the  cruelty 
and  treachery  of  Jael  and  Jezebel,  the  harsh 
Song  of  Deborah,  and  the  cynical  unbelief  of 
Ecclesiastes,  inevitably  appear.  Those  im- 
perfect moralities  and  defective  insights 
frankly  recorded  in  the  Old  Testament,  and 
sometimes  claiming  for  themselves  divine 
sanction,  belong  there  as  naturally  as  the 
blade  belongs  to  a  certain  stage  of  develop- 
ment in  that  process  which  leads  at  last  to 
the  full  corn  in  the  ear.  And  it  is  the  high 
office  of  modern  Biblical  study  to  discover 
and  to  disentangle  those  elements  which  are 
merely  local,  temporary,  and  incidental  from 
those  other  elements  which  are  universal, 
abiding,  and  essential.  It  is  in  the  interests 
of  an  honest  and  defensible  faith,  and  of  a 
consequent  increasing  usefulness  for  the  real 
content  of  this  literature,  that  thoughtful 


I04    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

men  are  scrutinizing  its  every  part  and  en- 
deavoring by  competent  scholarship  to  place 
our  confidence  in  its  permanent  value  upon 
foundations  which  stand  sure. 

The  positive  and  practical  value,  then, 
which  modern  critical  study  has  for  the  Bible 
will  be  found  mainly  in  these  four  considera- 
tions: First,  it  has  closed  the  debate  on  cer- 
tain vexed  questions  which  once  troubled  the 
heart  of  Israel  and  now  trouble  it  no  more. 
The  coarse  and,  from  the  present  point  of 
view,  the  senseless  attacks  upon  the  author- 
ity and  inspiration  of  the  Bible  made  by  such 
men  as  Thomas  Paine,  Robert  G.  Ingersoll, 
and  Charles  Bradlaugh  have  now  become  im- 
possible. If  brought  forward  to-day,  they 
would  not  even  amuse  or  entertain  or  shock, 
to  say  nothing  of  persuading,  the  average 
intelligence.  It  would  be  so  plain  that  such 
blows  were  directed  at  a  man  of  straw  that 
they  would  be  promptly  ruled  out  of  court 
as  incompetent,  irrelevant,  and  immaterial. 
The  Bible  itself  is  the  same  book  to-day  that 
it  was  when  the  attacks  referred  to  upon  its 
teachings  brought  consternation  to  the  ten- 
der hearts  of  many  believers,  but  the  whole 
point  of  view  held  by  thoughtful  people  has 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    105 

so  changed  as  to  rob  such  attacks  of  any 
measure  of  force. 

Modern  Biblical  study  has  relieved  those 
inadequate  moralities  of  an  earlier  day,  pa- 
triarchal polygamy,  unrebuked  slavery,  re- 
taliation of  the  eye-for-an-eye  and  tooth-for- 
a-tooth  sort,  from  the  impossible  task  of 
doing  duty  as  sanctions  for  the  moral  dull- 
ness and  backwardness  of  certain  Christian 
centuries.  It  has  also  relieved  those  inade- 
quate standards  of  an  early  day  from  the 
exacting  responsibility  of  undertaking  to 
serve  as  veritable  expressions  of  the  mind 
of  the  Lord.  To  us  they  are  nothing  of  the 
sort. 

Take,  for  example,  that  direction  given,  as 
the  narrative  states  with  divine  authority, 
regarding  the  law  of  retaliation.  It  pro- 
vided that  it  should  be  ''an  eye  for  an  eye,  a 
tooth  for  a  tooth,  a  life  for  a  life."  It  was, 
indeed,  a  word  of  the  Lord  for  the  crude 
moral  life  of  that  early  day.  An  eye  for  an 
eye  is  not  an  ideal  arrangement,  but  it  is 
better  than  a  head  for  an  eye.  It  provided 
for  a  measured  and  limited  retaliation  to  re- 
place that  wild,  unregulated  vengennce  into 
which    those   barbarous    people    often    fell. 


io6    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

Not  content  with  an  eye  for  an  eye,  they 
would  sometimes  in  the  spirit  of  vengeance 
take  the  Hf  e  of  one  who  had  maimed  another 
by  putting  out  his  eye.  Not  content  with  a 
life  for  a  life,  they  would  exterminate  a 
whole  tribe  when  one  man  of  the  offending 
tribe  had  killed  some  man  in  the  tribe  which 
sought  to  retaliate.  An  eye  for  an  eye,  a 
tooth  for  a  tooth,  a  life  for  a  life,  would 
mean  shameful  retrogression  for  the  more 
highly  developed  ethical  life  of  our  own  day, 
but  for  the  immature  life  of  that  primitive 
people  it  was  a  word  of  the  Lord  spoken  in 
advance  of  their  current  practice  and  calcu- 
lated to  lead  them  to  a  higher  level  of  con- 
duct. 

You  would  have  to  go  some  distance  from 
the  turnpike  to-day  to  hear  a  sermon  in  justi- 
fication of  that  law  of  retaliation  from  any 
other  point  of  view,  or  one  in  defense  of  the 
moral  quality  of  the  imprecatory  psalms,  or 
one  with  any  clear  note  of  approval  in  it  for 
the  cruder  doctrine  of  blood  atonement,  or 
one  with  any  expression  of  real  agreement 
with  many  of  those  inadequate  moral  stand- 
ards which,  to  an  earlier  generation,  stood 
as  the  very  law  of  heaven.    It  has  been  made 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    107 


clear  that  no  further  significance  attaches  to 
those  interesting  exhibits  of  the  law  of 
growth  than  we  attach  to  the  preliminary 
stages  in  any  other  process  of  development. 
The  process  is  to  be  judged,  not  by  the  crude 
appearance  or  the  unfinished  character  of  its 
earlier  phases,  but  by  its  final  outcome.  In- 
deed, all  work  is  to  be  judged  by  its  tenden- 
cies, direction,  and  ultimate  form  rather 
than  by  its  earlier  and  preparatory  stages. 
The  Bible  is  to  be  judged  by  the  moral  con- 
clusions to  which  it  finally  brings  us  and  by 
those  visions  of  spiritual  reality  which  hang 
clear  and  resplendent  in  our  sky  when  the 
fogs  of  an  earlier  morning  have  been  swept 
away. 

Modern  criticism  has  relieved  us  also  from 
the  mental  squint  consequent  upon  the  pain- 
ful effort  to  make  it  appear  that  every  part 
of  the  Bible  is  in  strict  agreement  with  every 
other  part.  It  does  not  attempt  to  square 
the  two  varying  narratives  of  the  Creation  in 
the  first  and  second  chapters  of  Genesis,  or 
to  find  perfect  agreement  in  the  two  accounts 
of  the  Deluge  differing  as  they  do  in  regard 
to  the  length  of  time  the  waters  were  upon 
the  earth  and  as  to  the  number  of  clean  ani- 


io8    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

mals  taken  into  the  ark,  or  to  reconcile  the 
divergent  statements  as  to  the  basis  offered 
for  Sabbath  observance  in  the  two  accounts 
of  the  Ten  Commandments  recorded  in  the 
twentieth  chapter  of  Exodus  and  in  the  fifth 
chapter  of  Deuteronomy.  It  does  not  seek, 
in  a  hundred  instances  which  might  be 
named,  to  estabHsh  an  exact  and  entire 
agreement  in  these  varying  narratives. 

We  have  abundant  evidence  for  the  exis- 
tence of  different  documents,  for  the  influ- 
ence of  varying  schools  of  opinion.  We 
know  that  the  priestly  and  the  prophetic  wri- 
ters in  the  Old  Testament,  in  narrating  the 
same  events,  held  different  points  of  view. 
They  varied  in  the  placing  of  their  emphasis 
and  in  their  general  interpretation. 

The  whole  game  of  hide  and  seek  skillfully 
played  with  proof  texts,  as  men  have  striven 
and  striven  in  vain  to  make  all  the  varying 
sections  of  this  entire  literature  speak  in  uni- 
son, is  a  thing  of  the  past  among  the  more 
intelligent  Bible  students.  The  efforts  of 
those  earnest  people  who  have  endured  an 
intellectual  agony  and  bloody  sweat,  in  their 
attempt  to  reconcile  part  with  part  in  the  in- 
terests of  some  theory  of  verbal  or  plenary 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    109 

inspiration,  have  been  practically  abandoned. 
Thoughtful  men  rejoice  that  scholarship  has 
arranged  these  sacred  writings  in  their  suc- 
cessive layers  so  as  to  indicate,  even  to  the 
popular  mind,  the  stages  of  growth  and  thus 
make  plain  the  successive  attainments  in 
moral  insight  and  in  spiritual  power  of  those 
men  of  old.  And  this  view  of  the  Bible  fur- 
nishes us  with  an  adequate  defense  against 
a  formal  line  of  attack  upon  its  inspiration, 
which  is  in  no  danger  of  being  discredited. 

In  the  second  place,  the  modern  method  of 
Biblical  study,  by  its  frank  acceptance  of  the 
principle  of  growth,  correlates  that  study 
with  all  other  study.  The  great  principle  of 
organic  evolution,  once  regarded  as  the  dire 
enemy  of  all  sound  religious  faith,  as  a  dan- 
gerous adversary  to  be  promptly  anathema- 
tized and  cast  out  of  the  synagogue,  has  now 
been  welcomed  and  made  at  home  in  the  field 
of  Bible  study.  The  earth  grew,  as  we  all 
know,  and  the  processes  of  development  laid 
bare  by  modern  geology  offer  us  a  most  fas- 
cinating field  for  study.  Institutions  grow, 
languages  grow,  literature  and  religions 
grow.  Each  one  of  these  mighty  trees  with 
branches  now  innumerable  was  once  like  a 


no    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

grain  of  mustard  seed.  In  similar  fashion 
the  Bible  itself  grew.  It  stands  before  us  as 
the  outcome  and  product  of  long  periods  of 
moral  development  where  men  at  first  groped 
in  thick  darkness,  and  then  began  to  see  as 
through  a  glass,  darkly,  and  then  later, 
touching  some  of  their  duties  and  privileges, 
saw  face  to  face. 

"The  impregnable  rock  of  holy  scripture" 
is  not  a  happy  phrase.  It  was  coined  and 
popularized  by  one  of  the  foremost  Christian 
statesmen  of  the  last  century,  William  Ewart 
Gladstone,  in  the  sketch  he  wrote  bearing 
that  significant  title,  but  its  associations  and 
suggestions  are  misleading.  The  Bible  is 
not  a  rock.  It  is  not  in  any  sense  "a  heavenly 
meteorite,"  as  some  pious  soul  called  it, 
dropped  down  out  of  the  sky  with  no  earthly 
history,  standing  quite  apart  from  the  grop- 
ings  and  yearnings  of  men. 

The  Bible  is  rather  one  of  those  mighty 
trees  having  its  roots  deeply  planted  in  that 
common  life  which  is  of  the  earth,  earthy; 
declaring  in  its  concentric  rings  the  story  of 
its  slow  advance;  exhibiting  in  the  shape  of 
its  spreading  branches,  in  the  color  and  for- 
mation of  its  twigs  and  leaves,  the  influence 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    in 


of  climatic  conditions.  The  inner  life  of  this 
useful  tree  which  bears  wholesome  fruit 
every  month  in  the  year  and  whose  very 
leaves  are  for  the  healing  of  the  nations,  is 
indeed  the  life  of  the  living  God,  but  the 
material  utilized  in  its  composition  was  taken 
from  the  common  soil.  The  great  tree  of 
scriptural  truth  as  it  stands  before  us  was 
formed  from  the  dust  of  the  ground,  but  the 
Eternal  Spirit,  through  the  profound  and 
unusual  experiences  of  the  men  who  wrote 
it,  breathed  into  it  the  breath  of  His  own 
mighty  life  until  it  stands  possessed  of  a  liv- 
ing soul. 

Modern  critical  study  has  brought  out 
more  clearly  this  process  of  development. 
Israel's  entire  message  to  the  world,  from 
the  ancient  Song  of  Deborah  and  the  early 
book  of  the  Covenant  on  up  to  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  and  the  prayer  of  Christ  the 
night  He  was  betrayed,  has  traveled  the 
main  road  of  historical  development. 

The  New  Testament  itself  opens  with 
what  may  seem  a  long,  tiresome,  and  mean- 
ingless list  of  proper  names.  But  these  dry 
names  furnish  us  a  line  of  human  genealogy. 
They  were  intended  to  throw  additional  light 


112     THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

upon  the  origin  of  the  unique  personaHty 
which  the  New  Testament  is  to  bring  to  the 
attention  of  the  world.  This  effort  to  trace 
the  human  ancestry  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
was  the  painstaking  attempt  of  some  Hebrew 
composing  his  gospel  especially  for  Hebrews 
to  indicate  that  some,  at  least,  of  the  forces 
which  brought  the  Messiah  lay  securely 
imbedded  within  the  history  of  His  own 
race. 

The  truth  of  God  in  its  entirety  comes  to 
us  in  this  organic  way.  It  is  not  a  freak  or 
a  fault  in  the  world  of  spiritual  formation. 
It  is  not  a  disconnected  phenomenon  stand- 
ing apart  in  the  world  of  magic.  The  study 
of  it  is  to  be  closely  correlated  with  all  other 
lines  of  serious  research. 

You  can  see  at  once  the  immense  gain  in 
interest  and  in  thoroughness  which  is  thus 
secured  for  Bible  study.  Here,  also,  the  sci- 
entific habit  of  mind  and  the  principles  of 
literary  criticism  are  to  be  made  at  home. 
Men  are  taught  to  notice  when  they  are  read- 
ing prose  and  when  they  are  reading  poetry 
—  the  difference  is  more  radical  than  w^ould 
be  indicated  by  merely  printing  one  in 
stanzas  and  the  other  solid.    The  principle  of 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    113 

development  in  the  changing  content  of  sin- 
gle words  is  to  be  regarded. 

Take,  for  example,  the  use  of  the  word 
"God."  When  Deborah  praised  the  cruel 
treachery  of  Jael  in  her  warrior's  song,  she 
used  the  word  "God."  When  the  priests  in 
Leviticus  indicated  what  they  thought  would 
be  pleasing  to  the  Almighty  in  the  matter  of 
elaborate  ceremonies  and  bloody  sacrifices, 
they  used  the  word  "God."  When  Isaiah 
arraigned  the  people  stricken  for  their  moral 
blindness,  calling  upon  them  to  forsake  their 
reliance  upon  vain  oblations  and  useless  cere- 
monies in  order  to  live  in  a  new  moral  atti- 
tude where  they  would  "cease  to  do  evil  and 
learn  to  do  well,"  he  used  the  word  "God." 
When  Jesus  spoke  to  the  souls  of  men  as 
never  man  spoke,  bidding  them  find  their 
highest  self-realization  by  entering  into  filial 
relations  wdth  the  Father,  He  employed  the 
same  term  "God." 

In  our  King  James  version  the  word  is 
spelled  throughout  with  the  same  three  let- 
ters and  is  pronounced  with  .the  .same  vocal 
sounds,  but  the  actual  distance  traversed  in 
the  essential  meaning  of  the  word  in  passing 
through  those  different  periods  which  I  have 


114    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

roughly  indicated  is  almost  immeasurable. 
Modern  Biblical  study  brings  this  out  more 
clearly  and  when  once  we  enter  into  the  spirit 
of  it,  we  no  longer  think  of  Bible  study  as  a 
field  of  inquiry  standing  apart.  It  is  a  field 
of  intense  and  vital  interest  joining  hard  on 
to  other  fields  of  serious  inquiry.  It  is  a  field 
where  the  principle  of  development  and  the 
general  method  of  an  organic  evolution  are 
constantly  kept  in  view.  It  is  a  field  where 
the  same  frankness,  rigor,  and  thoroughness 
which  belong  to  research  in  those  other 
fields,  are  welcomed  as  men  strive  to  know 
and  to  do  the  will  of  God. 

In  the  third  place,  the  modern  method  of 
Bible  study  adds  immeasurably  to  the  human 
interest  of  the  book.  When  once  we  think 
of  the  Bible,  not  as  dropped  down  from  the 
sky  to  become  the  priceless  heritage  of  the 
race ;  not  as  supernaturally  dictated  to  chosen 
penmen  who  but  dimly  felt  the  significance 
of  what  they  were  transmitting;  when  we 
think  of  it  as  the  patient  record  of  what  was 
once  slowly  wrought  into  the  conscious  expe- 
rience of  gifted  men  as  they  faced  duty, 
grappled  with  temptation,  bore  their  heavy 
burdens,  and  entered  at  last  into  the  high 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    115 

sense  of  spiritual  privilege, — when  once  we 
think  of  the  truths  of  the  Bible  as  thus  in- 
wrought in  the  experience  of  many  men 
varying  in  temperament,  in  moral  insight, 
and  in  spiritual  development,  we  see  how 
many  more  are  the  points  of  contact  between 
this  book  and  our  own  lives. 

When  rightly  studied  the  Bible  has  a  face 
like  our  own  face,  the  essential  lines,  fea- 
tures, and  expressions  of  this  modern  life  as 
we  know  it  are  suggested  and  reflected  there 
as  in  a  mirror.  The  Bible  has  a  face  like  our 
own  face,  now  clouded  by  defeat,  now 
marred  by  passion,  now  shining  with  the 
sense  of  spiritual  victory. 

The  Bible  has  a  hand  like  our  own  hand, 
capable  of  meeting  ours  in  a  genuine,  sym- 
pathetic, and  assuring  clasp.  It  has  a  hand 
stretched  out  with  an  offer  of  help  from  a 
vantage  ground  gained  through  moral  strug- 
gles similar  to  our  own. 

The  Bible  has  a  voice  like  our  own  reach- 
ing us  from  lands  and  times  and  situations 
far  removed,  but  none  the  less  an  intelligible 
and  assuring  voice.  It  has  a  voice  which 
speaks  somewhere  to  every  man  in  the  tongue 
in  which  he  was  born  and  in  the  very  mood 


ii6    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


where  he  finds  himself  in  his  hour  of  moral 
need.  It  has  a  voice  now  broken  with  its 
sense  of  failure,  and  now  ringing  clear 
through  the  joy  of  spiritual  advance,  but  it 
speaks  to  us  steadily  in  recognizable  accents 
a  message  from  the  Unseen. 

This  is  the  sort  of  Bible  study  to  which  the 
young  people  of  this  generation  are  being 
invited.  The  whole  method  of  modern  criti- 
cism has  helped  to  bring  the  Bible  down  out 
of  the  clouds  where  well-meant  but  unveri- 
fiable  dogmas  tended  to  remove  it,  and  make 
is  usefully  at  home  among  these  oft  recur- 
ring needs  of  men. 

The  human  touches  in  the  Bible  are  all  the 
more  striking  because  of  the  literary  habit 
of  that  oriental  world.  They  loved  the  story, 
the  parable,  the  warm,  concrete  picture 
rather  than  the  colder,  abstract  form  of 
statement.  If  the  writers  of  scripture  had 
all  been  born  in  New  Hampshire,  if  they  had 
gained  their  spiritual  meat  mainly  from  the 
perusal  of  John  Calvin's  "Institutes,''  if  they 
had  belonged  to  a  prosaic  generation  habitu- 
ated to  the  use  of  a  literal,  truth-telling 
kodak  or  of  some  phonographic  record  of 
every  notable  utterance;  if,  in  a  word,  they 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    117 

had  lived  always  in  the  white  light  of  the 
absolute  definite  statement  of  truth,  not  half 
suspecting  the  lovely  varieties  of  color  lurk- 
ing in  these  common  rays  about  us,  we 
should  have  had  a  very  different  Bible  but 
a  very  much  less  interesting  and  helpful  one. 
Our  task  of  interpretation  might  have  been 
easier,  but  oh !  so  much  less  rewarding. 

The  human  touches  contained  in  these  sug- 
gestive oriental  pictures  are  the  glory  of  it. 
The  symbols  and  metaphors  dealing  with 
spiritual  reality  in  poetic  fashion  have  more 
value  than  many  hard  and  fast  statements 
of  truth.  The  symbol  is  elastic ;  it  yields  new 
and  enlarging  meanings  to  successive  gen- 
erations of  discerning  minds  and  hearts  as 
they,  one  after  another,  learn  to  behold  its 
beauty. 

The  old  psalmist  said,  "I  will  say  of  the 
Lord,  He  is  my  refuge  and  my  fortress :  my 
God;  in  Him  will  I  trust.  Surely  .  .  .  He 
shall  cover  thee  with  His  feathers,  and 
under  His  wings  shalt  thou  trust."  "Wings 
and  feathers"  belonging  to  the  Divine  Being! 
God  shall  cover  thee  with  His  feathers  and 
under  His  wings  shalt  thou  trust!  The  idea 
would  be  startling  and  even  grotesque  had 


ii8    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 


not  familiarity  with  these  phrases  dulled  our 
minds  to  the  strangeness  of  them.  Are  we  to 
think  of  the  Almighty  then  as  fashioned  after 
the  likeness  of  some  gigantic  winged  creature 
of  the  sky?  Not  even  the  most  conservative 
literalist  would  urge  anything  quite  so  ab- 
surd. It  is  free,  bold,  sensuous  poetry  urg- 
ing in  downright  human  fashion  a  ready 
trust  in  that  protecting  care  of  which  wings 
and  feathers  are  the  striking  and  beautiful 
symbols. 

We  find  an  abundance  of  "wings  and  fea- 
thers" in  holy  writ.  We  find  in  the  Old  Tes- 
tament many  books  which  are  intensely 
human  and  of  great  value  if  these  striking 
figures  are  correctly  interpreted  and  given 
their  appropriate  setting.  The  book  of 
Esther,  containing  nowhere  a  clear  moral 
idea  and  not  having  in  it  from  first  to  last 
even  so  much  as  the  name  of  "God,"  is  none 
the  less  a  most  interesting  human  document 
showing  as  it  does  how  in  that  far  off  time  a 
woman's  personal  beauty  and  social  charm 
entered  into  the  shaping  of  events.  The  book 
of  Proverbs  is  an  intensely  human  book,  in- 
dicating in  its  whole  moral  tone  the  progress 
of  a  shrewd  worldly  temper  among  the  He- 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    119 

brews  as  they  parted  company  with  their 
greatest  prophets  and  became  the  followers 
of  a  more  material  form  of  success. 

The  book  of  Ecclesiastes  is  an  intensely 
human  composition  showing  the  development 
of  a  cynical  temper  among  those  men  who 
had  become  sated  with  success  and  pleasure. 
"That  which  befalleth  the  beasts  befalleth 
the  sons  of  men ;  as  the  one  dieth  so  the  other 
dieth.  Yea,  they  all  have  one  breath  so  that  a 
man  has  no  preeminence  above  the  beast,  for 
all  is  vanity  and  all  go  unto  one  place."  It 
would  be  difficult  to  find  a  more  flat-footed 
denial  of  the  truth  of  immortality  or  a  more 
complete  repudiation  of  the  moral  superi- 
ority of  men  to  the  beasts  of  the  field  than  is 
here  contained  in  holy  scripture,  but  it  all  be- 
longs naturally  to  the  history  of  that  period 
as  showing  the  prevailing  temper  of  its 
everyday  life. 

It  is  the  office  of  modern  Biblical  study  to 
indicate  these  various  points  of  view,  to  char- 
acterize these  different  schools  of  opinion, 
and  to  locate  them  in  the  great  historical 
process  which  brought  them  into  being.  And 
thus  such  study  adds  immensely  to  the  human 
interest  of  the  book  and  to  its  usefulness  as 


120    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

we  come  to  apply  its  conclusions  to  the  seri- 
ous business  of  living". 

In  the  fourth  place,  the  modern  method  of 
Biblical  study  gives  us  a  sense  of  perspective 
which  aids  greatly  in  placing  our  confidence 
in  the  unique  service  it  can  render  on  surer 
foundations.  This  sense  of  perspective  a'ids 
us  in  offering  the  world  with  scriptural  sanc- 
tion those  moral  and  religious  truths  which 
the  best  reason  and  the  best  conscience  of  the 
time  can  consistently  approve.  And  when 
once  we  cast  in  our  lot  with  this  method  of 
study  we  find  also  abundant  historical  rea- 
sons for  laying  aside  with  the  most  direct 
scriptural  warrant  certain  theological  views 
which  have  become  more  or  less  discredited 
on  philosophical  grounds. 

Let  me  illustrate  this  in  a  concrete  way. 
The  whole  doctrine  of  atonement  as  under- 
stood for  generations  was  based  more  largely 
upon  the  teachings  of  the  book  of  Leviticus 
as  to  the  efficacy  of  blood  in  propitiating  the 
anger  of  an  offended  deity  than  upon  the 
finer  spiritual  insight  of  the  Second  Isaiah 
or  upon  the  matchless  teachings  of  Christ 
Himself.  Yet  to-day  we  are  made  aware 
that  the  book  of  Leviticus  is  a  somewhat  nar- 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    121 

row-minded  compilation  of  official  directions 
for  the  use  of  the  priests,  and  that  it  em- 
bodies only  the  limited  and  exclusive  point  of 
view  of  the  ritualistic  school  of  religious 
opinion.  When  scripture  was  scripture,  no 
matter  where  found,  no  serious  objection 
was  made  to  the  construction  of  a  doctrine 
of  moral  reconciliation  for  use  in  a  Christian 
dispensation  from  the  material  in  that  an- 
cient priestly  document,  but  now  with  a  more 
accurate  appraisement  of  the  book  of  Leviti- 
cus its  value  for  the  substitutional  theory  of 
the  atonement  or  for  any  interpretation  to 
be  placed  upon  spiritual  reality  has,  in  the 
estimation  of  careful  scholarship,  undergone 
a  very  great  change. 

The  doctrine  of  evil  was  for  centuries  in 
^ihe  minds  of  millions  of  Christians  affected 
more  by  the  story  of  the  so-called  ''fall  of 
man,"  as  contained  in  the  third  chapter  of 
Genesis,  than  by  all  the  teaching  of  Christ  in 
the  four  Gospels  put  together.  Yet,  as  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  Christ  delivered  Hisentiremessage 
and  made  His  full  contribution  to  the  world's 
store  of  moral  truth  without  ever  referring 
once  in  His  recorded  teachings  to  that  narra- 
tive of  the  Garden  of  Eden.     Indeed,  after 


122    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

we  leave  the  third  chapter  of  Genesis  with 
its  story  of  the  man  and  the  woman  and  the 
forbidden  fruit,  we  never  find  that  narrative 
referred  to  again  by  any  prophet  or  priest, 
by  psalmist  or  historian,  in  all  the  Old  Tes- 
tament. It  is  never  referred  to  by  Christ  or 
utilized  by  any  New  Testament  writer  save 
Paul,  who,  briefly  and  by  way  of  illustration, 
makes  reference  to  it  some  three  or  four 
times.  And  the  use  of  it  as  a  sufficient  ac- 
counting for  the  presence  of  moral  evil  in  the 
world  and  as  furnishing  a  kind  of  back- 
ground for  the  whole  redemptive  undertak- 
ing which  culminated  in  the  coming  of 
Christ,  is  entirely  without  scriptural  war- 
rant. 

You  might  call  the  roll  of  all  the  doctrines 
of  religion  and  you  would  find  that  better 
methods  of  Bible  study  are  setting  them  one 
after  another  in  truer  perspective,  putting 
certain  claims  in  the  background  where  they 
may  remain  the  objects  of  a  genuine  histori- 
cal interest,  and  bringing  to  the  front  those 
weightier  matters  of  the  law,  justice,  mercy, 
and  truth,  the  great  right  things  which  are 
forever  vital. 

This  whole  method  leads  to  a  more  intelli- 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    123 


gent  and  verifiable  appraisement  of  those 
varied  sources.  Thoughtful  men  have  be- 
come impatient  v^ith  the  utterances  of  those 
religious  promoters  who  like  to  say  loudly, 
and  sometimes  fiercely,  "The  Bible  is  the  in- 
fallible word  of  God  from  lid  to  lid ;  we  be- 
lieve every  word  and  syllable  of  it."  Men 
have  come  to  feel  that  such  representations 
are  made,  not  in  the  spirit  of  the  love  of 
truth,  but  in  the  spirit  of  the  advertiser,  con- 
scious all  the  while  that  he  is  claiming  rather 
more  for  his  wares  than  the  facts  actually 
warrant,  but  excusing  himself  on  the  ground 
that  when  the  inevitable  scaling  down  takes 
place  in  the  minds  of  his  customers,  the  net 
result  will  be  approximately  correct. 

Such  an  attitude  must  of  necessity  be  an 
offense  to  Him  who  said,  "I  am  the  truth; 
and  ye  shall  know  the  truth,  and  the  truth 
shall  make  you  free."  The  sort  of  faith 
which  undertakes  to  find  in  the  Bible  nothing 
erroneous,  nothing  defective,  nothing  out- 
grown by  subsequent  development,  is  not  the 
faith  once  delivered  to  the  saints  for  which 
we  are  earnestly  to  contend.  I"  is  a  piece  of 
unfounded  arrogance  which  has  caused,  in 
my  judgment,  more  unbelief  ten  times  over 


124    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

than  it  has  been  able  to  cure.  We  shall  best 
serve  the  cause  of  truth  and  the  cause  of 
righteousness  by  those  methods  of  study 
which  give  us  a  correct  perspective,  return- 
ing to  the  history  of  theology  those  claims 
whose  value  belongs  entirely  to  an  earlier 
stage  of  development  and  bringing  to  the 
front  those  sublime  verities  which  constitute 
the  word  of  God  to  the  present  life  of  the 
race. 

If  I  may  venture  to  return  again  to  that 
vision  of  the  seer,  I  believe  that  "a  little 
book"  such  as  modern  scholarship  might  well 
offer  us,  containing  the  more  vital  portions 
of  the  Bible  and  within  the  compass  of  the 
average  interest,  would  have  more  worth  for 
the  layman  than  this  entire  literature  of 
sixty-six  books,  varying  as  they  do  so  greatly 
in  value.  The  Bible  has  been  hindered  in  its 
actual  usefulness  by  the  attempt  to  force  the 
whole  of  it  upon  the  attention  of  children  and 
of  busy  adults.  The  Bible  is  not  a  single 
book,  but  a  library  of  books,  a  national  liter- 
ature. We  do  not  think  of  turning  an  im- 
mature child  out  into  the  whole  of  English 
literature  as  soon  as  he  knows  his  letters. 
Little  books  are  provided  for  his  advancing 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    125 

needs,  first  readers,  second  readers,  third 
readers,  making  the  way  easier  and  more 
alluring  by  these  progressive  stages  which 
serve  to  usher  him  into  the  presence  of  the 
vast  literary  treasures  of  the  ages. 

In  similar  fashion,  to  turn  a  child  loose  in 
the  whole  Bible  is  to  load  him  with  questions 
and  confuse  him  with  problems  for  which  his 
hour  has  not  yet  come.  This  course  also  bur- 
dens the  parent  or  teacher  with  embarrass- 
ments needless  to  be  borne.  Here  are  the 
unclean  stories  of  Lot  and  Samson  and  Ab- 
salom. Here  are  the  shrewd,  bitter,  skepti- 
cal statements  of  the  blase  author  of  Eccle- 
siastes.  Here  are  the  cursing  psalms  where 
the  writer  blesses  the  man  who  will  take  the 
children  of  his  enemy  and  dash  their  brains 
out  on  the  stones.  Here  are  all  the  imperfect 
moralities  and  crude  attempts  of  those  an- 
cient minds  to  fathom  such  moral  mysteries 
as  are  suggested  by  the  terms  "hell"  and 
''devil.''  We  do  not  wish  to  tell  the  children 
any  lies  and  we  are  not  prepared  just  yet  to 
discuss  these  questions  to  the  bottom  with 
their  immature  minds.  But  when  we  under- 
take to  teach  the  entire  contents  of  this  liter- 
ature to  immature  children,  or  to  older  peo- 


126    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

pie  untrained  in  the  science  of  interpretation, 
we  speedily  find  ourselves  thus  embarrassed. 
A  little  book,  then,  or  perhaps  three  little 
books,  for  home  use  and  for  general  use  by 
all  laymen,  would  be  better  than  the  entire 
literature  contained  in  the  sixty-six  books. 
The  first  might  contain  the  more  wholesome 
stories  of  the  Old  Testament,  some  of  the 
simpler  psalms,  and  some  selected  passages 
portraying  that  moral  heroism  which  wins 
a  ready  response  from  youth.  The  second 
might  take  up  the  narrative  of  the  life  of 
Christ  with  His  deeds  of  love  and  His 
plainer  teachings,  leaving  out  of  considera- 
tion for  the  time  such  passages  as  that  which 
describes  the  cursing  of  the  fig  tree  or  the 
sending  of  the  devils  into  the  swine  or  the 
mysterious  words  about  an  unpardonable 
sin ;  it  might  also  contain  some  of  the  longer 
psalms  and  some  of  the  finer  chapters  of  the 
Epistles.  The  third  book  might  contain  more 
of  the  psalms,  the  best  of  Deuteronomy  and 
Isaiah,  and  some  of  the  splendid  moral  ap- 
peals from  the  other  prophets:  it  might  in- 
clude also  the  noble  poem  of  the  Creation  and 
the  best  of  the  drama  of  Job,  omitting  por- 
tions of  the  long  drawn  out  speeches  of  the 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    127 

three  tiresome  and  mistaken  men;  it  might 
well  contain  a  clear  and  connected  narrative 
of  the  history  of  Israel  and  the  main  body  of 
Christ's  teachings,  together  with  some  of  the 
greatest  appeals  of  the  Christian  apostles  as 
found  in  the  Epistles.  Three  such  little  books 
made  up  of  selections  from  the  Bible,  ar- 
ranged with  some  reference  to  their  logical 
order  and  to  the  gradually  unfolding  needs 
of  the  moral  life,  would  be  more  attractive 
and  more  useful  to  the  average  layman  than 
the  entire  canonical  scriptures  of  the  Old  and 
New  Testaments  in  a  single  volume. 

The  attempt  to  induce  children  or  even 
adults  to  read  the  Bible  through  in  course,  so 
many  chapters  a  day,  as  a  kind  of  tour  de 
force  well  pleasing  to  the  Lord  as  would  be 
some  devout  Moslem's  pilgrimage  to  Mecca 
in  the  eyes  of  Allah,  seems  thoroughly  im- 
wise.  The  ten  3^ear  old  boy  who  undertakes 
it  may  get  on  fairly  well  in  Genesis  and 
Exodus  with  their  interesting  narratives, 
wondering  however  at  some  of  the  strange 
recitals  he  encounters.  Fie  will  have  some 
dismal  hours  in  the  dull  pedigrees  where 
Abimelech  begat  somebody  who  in  turn  be- 
gat somebody  else.     But  when  he  reaches 


128    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

Leviticus  with  its  detailed  directions  as  to 
how  the  priests  were  to  prepare  the  sacrifices 
for  the  altar  and  carry  on  the  elaborate  ritual 
of  worship  in  that  far  off  land  and  time— a 
portion  of  scripture  about  as  interesting  and 
rewarding  to  a  ten  year  old  boy  as  would  be 
an  equal  number  of  chapters  from  "Chitty  on 
Pleading''— he  will  be  inclined  to  give  up 
once  for  all  his  attempt  to  read  the  Bible 
through  from  Genesis  to  Revelation.  And 
he  had  better  give  it  up.  The  Bible  has  many 
pages  where  the  mind  and  the  moral  nature 
of  a  boy  will  respond,  but  he  will  not  find 
them  readily  by  taking  the  whole  sixty-six 
books  in  course.  He  needs  a  little  book  in 
his  hand,  open. 

If  a  man  were  to  start  to  walk  across  the 
continent  from  San  Francisco  to  New  York 
in  course,  twenty-five  miles  a  day  perhaps,  his 
experience  up  through  the  Sacramento  Val- 
ley would  be  thoroughly  enjoyable.  He 
would  spend  delightful  days  in  the  foothills 
around  Auburn  and  Applegate.  He  would 
be  uplifted  and  inspired  as  he  reached  the 
crest  of  the  Sierra  at  Summit  and  as  he 
passed  on  down  the  other  side  along  the 
Truckee  River.     But  when  he  got  well  out 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  lURLE    129 

into  Nevada  the  dull  stretches  of  sage  brush 
and  alkali  plain  would  be  depressing.  His 
twenty-five  miles  a  day  there  would  become 
dull,  stale,  and  unprofitable.  He  might  sup- 
pose that  such  a  region  had  some  place  and 
use  in  the  universe,  but  the  meaning  of  it 
would  be  as  completely  hidden  from  the  aver- 
age man  as  is  the  real  worth  of  the  book 
of  Leviticus  from  the  understanding  of  a 
healthy  boy.  The  patient  traveler  wearied 
and  bored  would  be  inclined  to  turn  back  to 
California— and  he  had  better  turn  back. 
In  a  complete  account  of  the  universe  the  al- 
kali plains  and  sage  brush  of  Nevada  would 
have  to  go  in,  but  they  do  not  furnish  a  re- 
warding place  for  ordinary  people  to  go  for 
a  walk. 

In  a  complete  account  of  the  historical  pro- 
cesses where  lies  embedded  the  revelation 
God  has  made  to  men  in  the  Bible,  those 
difficult,  wearisome,  and  confusing  sections 
would  all  have  to  go  in.  It  is  well  for  schol- 
ars to  have  the  entire  movement  before  them 
as  it  was,  sage  brush  and  all.  But  for  ordi- 
nary uses,  home  use,  devotional  use,  instruc- 
tional use, — as  a  place  for  the  mind  and 
heart  to  go  and  walk  for  fifteen  minutes  a 


I30    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

day — there  are  whole  stretches  of  country 
which  are  not  immediately  available.  A  lit- 
tle book  in  the  hand,  open  to  every  reader 
without  reserve  or  npolog-y  or  tiresome  ex- 
planation, would  be  of  more  direct  service. 

It  is  a  practical  question,  not  a  sentimental 
one.  How  best  can  the  literature  here  ready 
for  our  use  be  made  to  minister  to  the  inner 
lives  and  spiritual  unfolding  of  busy  people  ? 
Great  sections  of  this  literature  are  never 
read  at  all.  Other  considerable  sections  of  it 
are  never  read  with  any  great  amount  of 
edification.  Many  of  the  most  familiar  bat- 
tle-grounds in  scripture,  such  as  the  narra- 
tive about  Jonah,  and  the  account  of  Joshua 
commanding  the  sun  to  stand  still,  and  the 
story  of  the  three  men  cast  into  the  furnace 
of  fire— many  of  these  famous  battle- 
grounds are  upon  soil  which  religious  people 
rarely  cultivate  with  seriousness  and  from 
which  the  spiritual  harvests  are  habitually 
meager. 

It  is  for  the  men  who  know  what  they  are 
about  in  theology  and  the  men  who  know 
their  way  about  in  pedagogy  to  join  hands 
and  so  bring  the  best  of  this  literature  to  the 
attention  of  busy  people,  so  relate  it  to  their 


THE  PRACTICAL  USE  OF  THE  BIBLE    131 

actual  interest,  and  so  induce  them  to  make 
habitual  use  of  it,  that  it  shall  in  ever  larger 
measure  make  them  wise  unto  moral  recov- 
ery and  furnish  them  thoroughly  with  those 
reliable  impulses  and  higher  sanctions  neces- 
sary for  all  good  work. 


ii 


V 

FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE 

IN  the  art  galleries  and  in  stained  glass 
windows  we  find  Christ  portrayed  with  a 
halo  round  His  head.  But  the  men  who  lived 
with  Him  and  wrote  the  four  Gospels  never 
speak  of  any  halo.  They  were  simple, 
straightforward  men  and  there  was  no  halo 
there.  It  was  more  accurate  to  picture  Him 
with  loaves  of  bread  in  His  hands  feeding  the 
hungry,  or  in  the  act  of  putting  His  hands 
compassionately  on  the  eyes  of  the  blind  that 
they  might  receive  sight,  or  as  girded  with  a 
towel  and  with  a  basin  of  water  in  His  hands 
that  He  might  wash  the  feet  of  His  disciples 
at  the  close  of  some  long,  exhausting  day. 
He  did  not  wear  the  peculiar  halo  of  a  sepa- 
rate and  cloistered  saintliness;  He  wore  the 
humbler  badge  of  some  useful  form  of  ser- 
vice. 

The  scene  referred  to,  where  He  appears 
132 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICK   133 

with  a  basin  of  water  and  a  towel,  is  most 
instructive.  The  loose  sandals  worn  in 
Palestine  leave  a  large  part  of  the  foot  bare 
and  during-  the  dav  sand  or  dust  collects.  Tt 
is  the  custom  of  the  country  to  offer  water 
and  towels  when  any  one  enters  a  home.  In 
the  homes  of  wealth  this  is  done  by  a  servant. 

But  Jesus  and  His  friends  were  poor  men. 
There  was  no  servant  at  hand  to  perform 
that  office  when  they  met  in  the  upper  room. 
And  when  no  one  of  the  disciples  volunteered 
to  render  this  service  to  the  Master  and  to 
the  other  disciples  that  evening  at  the  last 
supper,  Christ  Himself  rose  from  the  table 
and  did  it.  It  was  an  act  of  simple  kindliness 
performed  for  their  physical  comfort. 

But  it  w^as  much  more  than  that.  The  nar- 
rative in  the  synoptic  Gospels  indicates  that 
on  their  way  to  the  supper  the  twelve  men 
had  been  disputing  as  to  which  one  of  them 
should  be  the  greatest  in  the  new  kingdom 
they  believed  Christ  was  about  to  csta1)lisli. 
Each  one  wanted  to  be  Prime  Minister  or 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  or  to  hold  some 
conspicuous  position.  Each  one  desired  that 
he  might  sit  either  on  the  right  hand  or  on 
the  left  hand  of  autliority.     And  the  twelve 


134    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

men  had  become  warm  and  noisy  in  urging 
their  selfish  ambitions.  The  great  ones 
among  the  Gentiles  exercised  dominion  and 
these  twelve  Hebrews  felt  that  they  too 
should  be  princes  and  potentates  in  the  com- 
ing kingdom. 

What  could  the  Master  do  at  the  last  sup- 
per with  a  group  of  men  in  that  mood !  This 
scene,  according  to  the  narrative  in  the 
fourth  gospel,  immediately  preceded  the 
matchless  discourse  reported  in  the  four- 
teenth chapter.  Imagine  His  saying  to  men 
filled  to  the  eyes  with  pride  and  jealousy,  "In 
my  Father's  house  are  many  mansions.  .  .  . 
I  go  to  prepare  a  place  for  you."  Pic- 
ture the  effect  of  uttering  in  the  presence 
of  men  fairly  bursting  with  selfish  ambition 
such  a  word  as  this,  "Greater  love  hath  no 
man  than  this,  that  a  man  lay  down  his  life 
for  his  friends.  Ye  are  my  friends,  if  ye  do 
whatsoever  I  command  you.''  Pearls  before 
swine,  would  be  putting  it  mildly !  Therefore 
He  proceeded  to  wash  their  feet  and  by  this 
action  which  spoke  more  effectively  than 
words  He  also  washed  their  minds  and 
hearts,  making  them  sufficiently  clean  to 
react  under  the  message  He  had  for  them. 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  135 

One  man  in  the  group  protested.  It  was  a 
natural,  instinctive,  honorable  protest.  The 
original  brings  the  two  terms  of  the  contrast 
together  and  thus  into  bolder  relief,  "Thou— 
My !''  "Dost  thou  wash  my  feet  ?"  It  was 
unthinkable ! 

Then  Christ  said  to  this  reluctant  soul,  "If 
I  wash  thee  not  thou  hast  no  part  with  me." 
If  He  might  not  take  upon  His  heart  the 
needs  of  that  other  and  weaker  life,  the 
deeper  fellowship  possible  between  them 
would  be  impeded.  In  the  act  of  giving  and 
of  receiving  service  by  a  helpfulness  which 
becomes  reciprocal,  the  souls  of  men  are  knit 
together  as  by  nothing  else. 

Acts  of  kindness  are  tendered  which  can- 
not be  declined  wathout  loss.  If  in  some 
other  way  the  child's  need  of  food  and 
raiment,  of  shelter  and  education  could  be 
supplied  without  calling  upon  the  father  and 
the  mother,  it  would  be  a  sore  loss  to  them  as 
well  as  to  the  child.  It  is  blessed  to  give  and 
under  appropriate  conditions  it  is  also 
blessed  to  receive.  The  spirit  of  utter  inde- 
pendence of  all  one's  fellows  is  abnormal  and 
blighting.  We  find  that  the  hearts  of  those 
who  are  associated  and  organized  for  a  com- 


136    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

"mon  service  are  by  that  relationship  knit  up 
into  the  finest  form  of  fellowship  known.  If 
I  serve  not,  I  am  cut  off  from  fellowship  with 
those  whose  needs  I  might  meet  and  I  am  cut 
off  as  well  from  the  fine  fellowship  of  others 
who  also  serve. 

I  wish  to  emphasize  the  mutuality  of  it. 
There  are  those  who  have  learned  to  give  but 
not  to  receive.  They  can  serve  but  they  show 
themselves  ugly  and  repellent  when  a  service 
they  may  sorely  need  is  offered  them.  They 
stand  ready  to  wash  the  characters  of  their 
neighbors  with  vigor  and  thoroughness,  but 
are  unwilling  to  have  a  like  service  rendered 
unto  them  though  they  too  have  faults  abun- 
dant. The  only  lives  which  develop  normally, 
becoming  well-poised  and  serene,  are  those 
that  learn  the  art  of  give  and  take.  The 
weak  need  the  kindly  offices  of  the  strong 
and  the  strong  are  no  less  dependent  upon 
the  presence  of  the  weak  for  their  full  self- 
realization.  The  principle  of  reciprocity  is 
vital  to  moral  growth. 

"What  a  world  it  would  be,"  I  once  heard 
a  woman  say,  impatient  under  certain  de- 
mands made  upon  her,  "if  every  one  would 
only  take  care  of  himself,  bearing  his  own 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICR  137 

burdens,  paying-  his  own  debts,  overcoming 
his  own  temptations,  without  troubhng  other 
people."  What  a  world  indeed— a  world 
none  of  us  would  wish  to  stay  in  over  night. 
We  should  have  a  world  of  self-sufficient, 
self-centered  individuals  standing  apart  in 
moral  isolation,  cold  and  unsympathetic  as 
so  many  blocks  of  ice.  What  the  poets  have 
sung  and  the  prophets  have  foretold  is  a 
kingdom  ruled  and  welded  into  a  whole  by  a 
sympathetic  spirit.  The  social  ideal  which 
kindles  our  own  hearts  is  that  of  a  republic 
of  souls  free  and  brave  but  unified  by  the 
spirit  of  mutual  helpfulness.  We  can  only 
attain  unto  that  by  bearing  one  another's 
burdens  in  that  mutuality  of  service  which 
becomes  the  glorious  fulfillment  of  the  law  of 
Christ. 

The  utility  of  associated  and  organized 
effort  is  one  of  the  most  significant  facts  in 
this  modern  world.  The  presence  of  labor 
unions  means  that  the  individual  working- 
man  is  no  longer  compelled  to  stand  alone 
and  helpless  before  his  employer  who  may  be 
a  mighty  corporation.  By  the  principle  of 
collective  bargaining  his  personal  interests 
are  bound  up  in  a  common  bundle  with  the 


138    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

interests  of  a  thousand  or  of  ten  thousand  of 
his  fellows,  and  their  united  voice  in  any  dis- 
puted question  comes  to  be  regarded. 

By  this  principle  of  association  individual 
workingmen  do  not  go  about  bidding  the 
bread  out  of  each  other's  mouths  because  of 
pressing  personal  necessity.  The  single  man 
does  not  consent  to  a  lower  wage  than  the 
man  with  a  family  can  afford  to  accept  in 
order  to  get  his  job  away  from  him.  The  man 
of  phenomenal  strength  and  endurance  does 
not  for  the  sake  of  currying  favor  with  his 
employer,  consent  to  a  length  of  working  day 
or  to  a  pace  in  industry  which  the  average 
man  finds  impossible.  "We  stand  together 
and  bear  one  another's  burdens  in  a  mutu- 
ality of  service,"  workingmen  everywhere 
are  saying,  "by  this  principle  of  associated 
effort." 

And  the  employers  uniting  in  their  agen- 
cies against  frauds,  against  firms  or  indi- 
viduals who  habitually  fail  to  pay  their  bills, 
against  fire  and  all  the  untoward  incidents  of 
commercial  life  are  illustrating  the  same  law 
of  mutuality  in  service.  Life  insurance  and 
fire  insurance  companies  are  organized  ex- 
pressions of  the  fraternal  spirit.  The  burden 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  139 

of  fire  or  of  death  does  not  fall  upon  a  single 
group;  it  is  shared  by  all  those  whose  pay- 
ment of  premiums  has  helped  to  create  the 
fund  out  of  which  the  loss  is  relieved.  It  is 
the  law  of  life.  No  man  should,  and  in  the 
long  run  no  man  can,  live  unto  himself.  We 
are  all  by  nature  members  one  of  another, 
and  the  highest  self-realization  can  only  come 
through  the  acceptance  of  that  fundamental 
principle. 

Here  we  find  the  ultimate  warrant  for  the 
organization  of  religious  aspiration  and  ef- 
fort in  what  is  known  as  ''the  church."  We 
do  not  claim  that  some  mysterious  and  saving 
potency  resides  in  the  very  structure  of  these 
ecclesiastical  institutions,  actually  determin- 
ing the  eternal  destiny  of  men  as  they  become 
or  fail  to  become  enrolled  members  of  the 
visible  organization.  The  church,  whatever 
name  it  bears — and  I  use  the  term  here  in 
the  broadest  sense  as  including  the  Protes- 
tant, the  Catholic,  and  the  Hebrew — is  simply 
a  certain  section  of  the  religious  sentiment  of 
the  community  organized  and  ready  to  take 
the  field  for  needed  action. 

There  are  those  who  say  that  they  have  no 
need  of  the  church,  that  they  can  be  religious 


I40    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

at  home,  quite  apart  from  all  public  worship 
or  organized  effort.  And  having  said  this 
they  commonly  feel  that  they  have  dis- 
charged their  entire  obligation  tow^ard  or- 
ganized religion.  They  could  teach  their 
own  children  at  home  too,  but  on  the  whole 
the  public  schools  and  the  colleges  do  it  better 
for  the  community  at  large.  Viewed  solely 
from  the  standpoint  of  personal  interest,  he 
would  be  a  foolish  man  who  would  turn  away 
from  all  schools  and  colleges,  universities 
and  public  libraries,  on  the  ground  that  he 
could  hammer  out  a  bit  of  learning  on  his 
own  little  anvil  at  home. 

In  the  last  analysis  it  is  a  practical  ques- 
tion. How  many  of  those  people  who  do 
entirely  dissociate  themselves  from  the  life 
of  the  church,  habitually  spend  one  hour  a 
week  in  reading  the  Scriptures,  in  prayer  or 
in  direct  and  resolute  attention  to  some  fur- 
ther phase  of  Christian  duty  and  privilege? 
The  lack  of  fellowship  in  the  life  of  aspira- 
tion commonly  weakens  the  spirit  of  aspira- 
tion. The  president  of  Bowdoin  College 
states  the  principle  clearly,  "The  life  of  ser- 
vice revealed  by  Christ  and  begotten  in  us  by 
the  Spirit,  demands  a  socially  effective  or- 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE   141 

ganization  and  expression  that  those  who 
share  this  life  may  be  bound  closely  together, 
that  the  enthusiasm  of  it  may  be  kept  alive, 
and  that  those  who  are  losing  it  may  be 
brought  to  share  in  its  blessings  and  privi- 
leges/' 

It  is  a  distinct  loss  to  any  soul  to  lack  this 
sense  of  union  with  the  great  body  of  aspir- 
ing men.  It  must  be  strange  for  any  one 
to  travel  in  Europe,  visiting  the  mighty 
cathedrals  reared  by  religious  aspiration, 
studying  the  masterpieces  of  painting  and 
sculpture  wrought  out  under  the  stimulus  of 
religious  emotion,  hearing  the  music  of  the 
greatest  oratorios  or  the  opera  of  Parsifal 
with  religion  as  their  theme,  and  to  feel 
throughout  that  he  is  a  stranger  and  a  for- 
eigner in  that  mighty  kingdom  where  all  this 
was  produced.  He  must  be  conscious  that 
for  some  reason  he  has  not  become  a  natural- 
ized citizen  with  a  recognized  domicile  in  any 
one  of  the  states  which  make  up  the  republic 
of  God,  standing  as  it  does  for  so  much  en- 
richment in  the  world's  history.  The  noblest 
life  cannot  be  lived  thus  detached.  It  needs 
to  find  institutional  expression  and  institu- 
tional fellowship.     The  cultivation  of  spir- 


142     THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

itual  life  entirely  apart  from  any  branch  of 
the  church,  Protestant,  Catholic,  or  Hebrew, 
is  like  the  task  of  cultivating  patriotism  in  a 
man  who  refuses  allegiance  to  any  country. 

I  have  listened  reverently  to  the  service  of 
the  Mass  according  to  the  Roman  Catholic 
ritual  in  St.  Peter's  at  Rome ;  I  have  heard  a 
chorus  of  a  hundred  men  chant  the  liturgy  of 
the  Greek  Church  in  the  Cathedral  in  the 
Kremlin  at  Moscow ;  and  I  have  heard  a  rude 
choir  of  Indian  boys  sing  the  old  Gregorian 
chants  in  a  Russian  mission  on  the  west  coast 
of  Alaska.  I  have  heard  the  call  to  prayer 
from  the  minaret  and  have  seen  devout  Mos- 
lems prostrate  in  worship  in  the  Mosque  of 
St.  Sophia  at  Constantinople ;  I  have  watched 
the  tear-stained  faces  of  devout  Jews  pour- 
ing out  their  hearts  before  that  fragment  of 
the  old  Temple  enclosure  at  the  Jews'  Wail- 
ing Place  in  Jerusalem.  I  have  seen  the 
Buddhist  priests  leading  .the  worship  of  the 
Japanese  in  the  great  Hongwanji  Temple  at 
Kyoto ;  and  I  have  studied  the  stolid  faces  of 
the  Chinese  in  their  Joss  Houses  in  old 
Shanghai.  And  although  in  every  case  the 
mode  of  worship  and  the  language  in  which 
it  was  offered  were  utterly  unlike  my  own, 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  143 

the  essential  spirit  of  what  I  saw  in  them  all 
was  akin  to  what  I  find  in  my  own  breast. 
In  that  common  sense  of  dependence  upon 
and  of  kinship  with  the  Unseen,  in  that  deep 
yearning  and  longing  for  a  more  effective 
sense  of  fellowship  with  the  divine,  we  were 
all  one.  I  shared  with  them  all  this  wide- 
spread and  persistent  hunger  of  the  heart. 
And  the  deepest  instinct  of  my  soul  would 
impel  me  to  seek  admission  into  some  branch 
of  the  church  universal  which  organizes  and 
socializes  this  aspiration. 

We  have  laid  so  much  stress  upon  indi- 
vidualism in  this  new  country  of  political 
equality  and  unparalleled  personal  oppor- 
tunity that  we  have  only  partially  appre- 
hended the  value  of  institutionalism.  We  are 
beginning  to  learn  more  fully  that  the  indi- 
vidual only  realizes  himself  through  combi- 
nation with  other  individuals. 

When  the  Hebrews  returned  from  Bal)y- 
lon  and  began  to  restore  the  walls  of  Jerusa- 
lem "every  man  built  over  against  his  own 
house."  He  found  his  particular  respon- 
sibility at  his  own  door.  But  in  meeting  that 
particular  responsibility  he  had  a  glad  sense 
that  the  portion  of  wall  laid  up  by  his  hands 


144    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

would  help  to  guard  the  domestic  and  com- 
mercial interests  of  all  the  other  men  in  the 
city.  And  his  heart  was  reassured  by  the 
feeling  that  he  in  turn  would  enjoy  a  more 
complete  safety  consequent  upon  their  efforts 
in  wall  building. 

It  was  this  sense  of  connection  with  and 
of  participation  in  a  larger  movement  which 
uncovered  to  each  individual  Hebrew  a 
deeper  source  of  motive.  When  he  took  up 
his  particular  brick,  the  act  seemed  insignifi- 
cant—it was  only  a  bit  of  burnt  clay  laid  in  a 
certain  place.  But  when  the  brick  went  into 
a  wall,  relating  itself  to  millions  of  other 
bricks,  and  when  the  completed  wall  sur- 
rounded a  city  as  its  main  defense,  and  when 
that  city  was  Jerusalem,  the  headquarters  of 
the  Hebrew  people  who  have  so  effectively 
woven  their  history  into  the  higher  life  of 
the  world  through  their  poets,  their  prophets, 
and  their  Messiah  born  in  Bethlehem  of 
Judea,  then  the  simple  act  of  that  man  taking 
a  brick  in  his  hand  was  clothed  with  a  new 
significance.  He  found  his  own  self-reali- 
zation, he  found  the  deeper  meaning  of 
his  individual  acts,  he  found  motive  and 
stimulus  prompting  him  to  a  finer  fidelity  in 
the  discharge  of  his  particular  duty,  as  he 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  145 

felt  his  own  life  organized  with  that  of  hun- 
dreds of  other  men  in  that  vaster  enter])rise. 
The  fact  of  organization  makes  the  efforts 
of  all  and  the  efforts  of  each  more  effective, 
and  it  also  develops  a  profounder  sense  of 
sympathy.     We  learn  to  keep  step  with  the 
whole  company  marching  in  one  direction 
under  a  common  banner.    Each  man's  cour- 
age is  augmented  as  he  touches  elbows  with 
his  fellows  and  hears  the  tread  of  marching 
men  conscious  that  he  too  is  contributing  to 
that  combined  result.    Not  even  the  personal 
assurance  of  divine  help  can  take  the  place 
of  that  sense  of  reinforcement  which  comes 
when  we  see  the  look  of  interest  in  other 
faces  like  our  own  face  and  feel  the  hand 
clasp  of  personal   fellowship  which  brings 
love  within  arm's   length  and  becomes  an 
earnest  of  the  combined  strength  of  that 
army  of  aspiring  men  with  which  w^e  are 
allied. 

''  Who  cares  for  the  burden,  the  night  and  the 
rain, 
And  the  long,  steep  lonesome  road. 
When  at  last  through  the  darkness  a  light 

shines  plain. 
When  a  voice  calls  '  Hail '  and  a  friend  draws  rein, 
With  an  arm  for  the  stubborn  load." 


146    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

"  For  life  is  the  chance  of  a  friend  or  two 
This  side  of  the  journey's  goal. 
Though  the  world  be  a  desert  the  long  night 

through 
Yet  the  gay  flowers  bloom  and  the  sky  shows 
blue 
When  a  soul  salutes  a  soul." 

It  is  written  that  where  two  or  three  are 
gathered  together  in  a  certain  name,  that  is 
to  say  in  a  certain  high  mood  and  for  a  cer- 
tain lofty  purpose,  reinforcements  will  come 
ensuring  victory.  ''Where  two  or  three  are 
gathered  together  in  my  name,  there  am  I  in 
the  midst."  The  claim  is  well  supported  by 
the  facts  of  psychology  as  well  as  by  the  high 
assertions  of  theology.  Powerful  reactions 
come  both  perpendicularly  and  horizontally 
when  men  are  banded  together  for  worthy 
ends  and  these  reinforcements  become  deci- 
sive. Each  one  feels  and  shares  in  the 
strength  of  the  pack. 

By  the  association  of  effort,  individual 
energy  is  multiplied  in  a  kind  of  geometrical 
ratio.  "One  of  you  shall  chase  a  thousand, 
and  two  shall  put,"  not  two  thousand  as  we 
might  naturally  suppose  but,  "ten  thousand 
to  flight."    This  was  the  promise  made  of  old 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE   147 

and  it  was  no  mere  play  upon  words  or  the 
idle  boast  of  an  ungrounded  enthusiasm. 
Any  man  lined  up  with  other  men  for  some 
exalted  purpose,  feeling  in  himself  a  gener- 
ous measure  of  tlicir  allied  strength,  per- 
suaded of  ultimate  victory  all  the  more  surely 
because  of  a  certain  contagion  of  courage, 
multipHes  his  own  normal  strength  by  five. 
Thus  if  one  righteous  man  chases  a  thousand 
evil  doers,  two  such  men  organized  for  ac- 
tion may  put  ten  thousand  to  flight.  It  is 
significant  that  the  original  twelve  apostles 
went  out  "two  by  two.'*  This  w^as  fellowship 
in  service  reduced  to  its  lowest  possible 
terms,  but  it  was  far  and  away  better  than 
the  loneliness  of  unorganized  effort. 

In  service  there  is  also  developed  a  new 
sense  of  fellowship  with  the  divine.  In  the 
life  of  the  One  who  stands  as  the  supreme 
historical  manifestation  of  what  is  godlike, 
the  spirit  of  service  is  most  conspicuous.  *T 
came  not  to  do  mine  own  will  but  His."  "I 
am  among  you  as  one  that  serveth."  'The 
Son  of  Man  is  come  not  to  be  served  but  to 
serve  and  to  give  his  life  for  the  moral  re- 
covery of  many." 

His  standard  of  values  was  based  alto- 


148     THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

g-ether  upon  this  principle  of  service.  "Among 
the  Gentiles  the  great  ones  exercise  domin- 
ion. It  shall  not  be  so  among  you.  He  that 
would  be  chief  among  you  let  him  serve. 
The  greatest  of  all  is  the  servant  of  all.'' 
Usefulness  is  greatness  and  there  is  none 
other. 

It  follows  then  inevitably  that  the  direct 
pathway  into  fellowship  with  the  divine  lies 
along  the  line  of  useful  service.  The  Master 
who  made  this  word  of  service  flesh,  causing 
it  to  dwell  among  us  full  of  grace  and  truth, 
identified  Himself  directly  with  the  need  of 
the  world.  He  felt  it  so  intensely  and  sym- 
pathetically as  to  make  it  His  own.  "I  was 
hungry  and  ye  gave  me  meat.  I  was  naked 
and  ye  clothed  me.  I  was  sick  and  in  prison 
and  ye  visited  me.''  He  uttered  these  words 
not  as  a  glowing  figure  of  speech  but  as  the 
sober  statement  of  a  fact  of  experience.  And 
when  men  gave  food  to  the  hungry,  raiment 
to  the  unclothed,  and  visited  the  lowliest  of 
those  who  were  sick  or  imprisoned,  they 
were  by  those  acts  of  kindness  brought  into 
immediate  fellowship  with  Him.  "Inasmuch 
as  ye  did  it  unto  the  least  of  these,  ye  did  it 
unto  me." 


FELLOWSHIP  TIIROUCilF  SI^RVTCF^ 


149 


In  view  of  the  fact  that  our  highest  con- 
ception of  the  divine  shows  a  nature  not 
standing  apart  in  sacred  majesty  or  in  pas- 
sive contemplation  of  the  world's  pain,  but  in 
active  and  ceaseless  ministry  to  its  need,  it 
is  evident  that  we  can  best  experience  a  sense 
of  fellowship  with  the  divine  through  loving 
service.  Not  in  mystic  contemplation  or  in 
strivings  after  spiritual  ecstasies,  but  in  the 
direct  consecration  of  one's  best  powers  to 
the  meeting  of  human  need  do  we  best  come 
to  know  the  presence  and  the  help  of  God. 
When  any  man  undertakes  to  save  his  own 
soul  by  withdrawing  from  the  ordinary  secu- 
lar activities  of  the  world  lest  he  should  be 
contaminated  by  evil,  and  spends  his  strength 
in  seeking  rapt  communion  with  the  Most 
High,  he  loses  it.  When  any  man  goes  into 
the  thick  of  the  fight  and  invests  his  life  in 
heroic  service  to  the  point  where  he  loses 
sight  of  his  own  immediate  personal  inter- 
ests, he  finds  his  life  and  keeps  it  unto  life 
eternal. 

The  deeper  understanding  of  the  doctrine 
of  atonement  comes  less  by  theological  re- 
search than  by  the  insight  which  springs 
from  the  life  of  devoted  service.     We  may 


I50    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

be  puzzled  and  confused  by  some  of  the 
learned  efforts  to  accurately  appraise  and 
adjust  the  benefits  of  Christ's  sacrifice  of 
Himself,  but  as  active  participants  in  the 
work  of  moral  recovery  we  find  a  truer 
method  of  interpretation.^  ''Nothing  short 
of  this  experience  of  earnest  service  and  un- 
flinching sacrifice  for  the  triumph  of  God's 
will  and  the  good  of  man  can  interpret  to  us 
to-day  the  meaning  of  the  sacrifice  of  Christ. 
Every  man  'who  has  tried  to  do  these  things 
in  any  degree  knows  full  well  that  there  can 
be  no  salvation  either  from  sin  or  from  the 
misery  sin  entails  on  guilty  and  innocent 
alike,  save  by  the  vicarious  sacrifice  of  some 
brave,  generous  servant  of  righteousness  and 
benefactor  of  his  fellows.  The  doctrine  of 
atonement  is  self-evident  to  every  man  who 
has  ever  fought  intrenched  and  powerful  evil 
or  sought  to  rescue  the  wicked  from  their 
wickedness.  While  to  those  who  have  never 
touched  the  fearful  burden  of  human  sin  and 
misery  with  so  much  as  the  tips  of  their 
dainty  and  critical  fingers  the  doctrine  of 
vicarious  suffering,  like  all  the  deeper 
truths   of   the   spiritual   life,   must   remain 

1  **  God's  Education  of  Man."— ^w.  Dewitt  Hyde. 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE   151 

forever  an  unintelligible  and   inii)cnclrable 
mystery." 

If  any  man  will  take  upon  his  own  heart 
his  full  share  of  the  shame  and  the  wrong  in 
civic  life,  by  seeking  to  have  the  principles  of 
equity  stand  fast  and  bear  rule,  he  will  by 
that  public  spirited  service  be  brought  into 
such  fellowship  with  the  divine  purpose  as  to 
understand  sympathetically  the  deeper  mean- 
ing of  life.  If  any  pure-hearted  woman  will 
take  upon  her  heart  something  of  the  burden 
of  shame  and  sorrow  which  has  fallen  upon 
the  less  fortunate  of  her  sex  by  defective 
training,  by  false  social  standards,  and  by 
the  pressure  of  inequitable  economic  condi- 
tions quite  as  much  as  through  their  own 
evil  choices,  she  will  enter  into  the  deeper 
meaning  of  redemption.  If  any  of  you  shall 
go  into  unfavored  communities  and  take 
upon  your  consciences  a  full  measure  of  re- 
sponsibility for  the  lives  which  remain  sordid 
and  unaspiring  through  their  lack  of  the 
ministry  of  education  at  its  best,  you  will  in 
that  very  task  learn  the  method  of  moral  re- 
covery through  sacrifice. 

I  have  emphasized  the  high  privilege  of 
fellowship,  human  and  divine,  to  be  attained 


152    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

by  unselfish  service,  because  I  wish  to  bring 
out  the  joy  of  Christian  living  under  these 
modern  conditions  of  thought  and  action. 
The  medieval  asceticism  and  religious  morti- 
fication of  the  flesh  were  in  the  nature  of  a 
protest,  a  much  needed  protest  it  may  be, 
against  the  untrammelled  license  and  coarse 
indulgence  of  that  period.  But  in  the  very 
nature  of  the  case  that  mode  of  life  could 
never  be  accepted  as  an  ultimate  ideal. 

"If  thy  right  hand,"  the  trained  and  choice 
faculty,  "cause  thee  to  stumble,  cut  it  off." 
It  is  better  to  enter  into  life  maimed  than 
having  two  hands  to  make  moral  shipwreck. 
It  is  better  to  cut  the  hand  off  than  to  steal 
or  to  forge  with  it.  It  is  better  to  pluck  the 
right  eye  out  than  to  look  approvingly  upon 
evil.  It  is  better  to  cut  the  right  foot  off 
and  sit  down  the  rest  of  one's  days  or  rely 
upon  a  crutch,  than  to  walk  with  springing 
step  in  the  path  of  wrong  doing.  "Betters- 
aye,  verily,  amputation  of  faculty  is  better 
than  degradation ! 

If  the  choice  lay  entirely  between  these 
two  options  then  amputation  of  the  various 
faculties  and  interests  which  cause  men  to 
stumble  would  be  forever  preferable  to  deg- 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  153 

radation.  But  there  is  a  third  option— the 
best  choice  Hes  in  that  course  of  action  which 
leads  to  the  consecration  of  these  faculties 
and  interests  to  worthy  use,  allowing  them 
to  find  therein  that  full  self-realization  which 
is  their  salvation.  Degradation,  amputation, 
consecration— the  second  is  always  better 
than  the  first,  but  best  of  all  is  that  conse- 
cration of  faculty  to  worthy  use  which  yields 
the  full  joy  of  Christian  service. 

You  will  best  construe  the  Christian  life 
under  modern  conditions  as  you  do  it  in 
terms  of  privilege  rather  than  in  terms  of 
hard  moral  necessity.  Christianity  is  not  a 
new  and  more  exacting  set  of  rules  than  are 
found  in  the  Ten  Commandments.  It  is  not 
a  more  searching  system  of  ethics  to  become 
at  once  the  allurement  and  the  despair  of  our 
faulty  moral  natures.  The  Christian  mes- 
sage is  a  gospel,  a  piece  of  good  news,  the 
announcement  of  privilege  which  stands  be- 
fore us  like  a  wide  open  door. 

And  duty,  under  the  Christian  regime,  is 
not  a  hard  impersonal  thing  holding  the 
moral  nature  as  in  a  vise.  Duty  is  the  loving 
sense  of  compulsion  from  within  which  a 
man  feels  when  in  a  filial  spirit  he  recognizes 


154    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

that  his  interests  and  the  Eternal  Father's 
interests  are  all  one.  His  sense  of  duty  im- 
pels and  permits  him  to  say,  ''I  must  be  about 
my  Father's  business."  He  asks  nothing 
better  than  to  share  in  the  Father's  work  and 
to  share  in  the  ultimate  reward  of  it. 

When  we  thus  rightly  conceive  of  it  the 
pathway  of  duty  is  no  longer  a  way  of  de- 
pressing and  hopeless  failure,  consequent 
upon  the  gap  between  our  highest  ideals  and 
our  actual  achievements.  It  becomes  a  way 
of  gradual  growth  where  a  child  by  a  regular 
organic  process  adds  cubit  after  cubit  to  his 
moral  stature,  moving  the  while  up  toward 
the  full  expectation  cherished  on  his  behalf 
by  a  benign  Father.  We  are  being  judged  at 
this  hour  not  by  the  measure  of  perfection 
we  are  able  to  show  in  our  actual  achieve- 
ments, but  rather  according  to  the  purposes 
which  have  become  fundamental  and  con- 
trolling in  our  lives,  according  to  the  long- 
ings and  aspirations  which  furnish  impulse 
for  all  our  efforts.  And  therein  lies  the  glo- 
rious liberty  and  surpassing  joy  of  the  chil- 
dren of  God. 

Duty  is  privilege.  Right  character  lies  in 
the  purpose  to  enter  progressively  into  the 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  155 

fulness  of  that  privilege.  And  the  highest 
reward  for  duty  well  done  springs  from  this 
sense  of  personal  participation  in  an  august 
moral  enterprise  presided  over  by  the  Father. 

It  was  once  my  good  fortune  to  hear  Fred- 
erick W.  Seward,  who  was  Acting  Secretary 
of  State  in  April,  1865,  during  the  illness  of 
his  father,  William  H.  Seward,  describe  to  a 
small  group  of  friends  the  last  Cabinet  meet- 
ing which  Lincoln  attended.  After  the  som- 
ber experiences  through  which  they  had  been 
passing  for  four  years  this  was  a  meeting  of 
good  cheer.  Lee  had  surrendered  and  the 
terms  offered  him  by  General  Grant  had  been 
approved.  Sherman  was  pressing  Johnson's 
army  so  close  that  its  surrender  seemed  only 
a  question  of  hours— and  that  would  end  the 
war.  All  the  members  of  the  Cabinet  felt 
that  a  great  load  was  being  rolled  away. 

When  the  business  of  the  hour  had  been 
despatched,  Lincoln  walked  to  the  window 
which  looked  toward  the  South  as  if  he  saw 
in  a  vision  those  scenes  which  had  cost  the 
nation  so  much  blood  and  treasure.  'It  has 
been  a  hard  struggle,"  he  said,  half  aloud 
and  half  to  himself,  ''but  it  is  about  over, 
thank  God."    The  next  night  he  fell  by  the 


156    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

hand  of  the  assassin.  And  though  his  last 
hours  were  hours  of  physical  distress  and 
though  the  noble  head  was  marred  by  a 
bullet-hole,  there  was  a  look  of  exaltation 
upon  his  face  as  he  lay  in  state  in  the  Capitol 
at  Washington— Capitol  still  of  the  whole 
United  States,  his  casket  draped  in  the  na- 
tional colors  with  all  the  stars  together  in 
one  common  field  of  blue  and  now  too  pure 
to  float  above  a  slave.  There  was  that  high 
look  of  exaltation  upon  his  face  as  if  he,  too, 
through  the  faithful  performance  of  duty, 
through  the  maintenance  of  the  spirit  of  de- 
voted service,  had  entered  fully  into  the  joy 
of  his  Lord. 

The  greatest  thing  which  life  does  for  any 
man  is  to  cause  him  to  love.  Three  things 
abide,  faith,  hope,  love,  and  "the  greatest  of 
these  is  love."  And  we  only  learn  to  love  j.s 
we  learn  to  serve. 

On  that  road  from  Jerusalem  to  Jericho 
three  men  walked  in  a  never-to-be-forgotten- 
procession.  The  priest  who  came  first  wa^^. 
a  man  who  preached  about  love.  He  knev.' 
that  the  first  and  great  commandment  in  the 
law  was  *Thou  shalt  love  the  Lord  thy  God 
with  all  thy  heart''  and  that  the  second  was 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE   157 

like  unto  it,  'Thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbor  as 
thyself."  But  when  he  saw  the  wounded 
traveler  at  the  roadside,  bloody,  dusty,  and 
half-dead,  the  disagreeable  task  of  doing 
something  for  his  relief  was  too  much  for 
the  priest.  He  passed  by  on  the  other  side, 
showing  that  with  all  his  beautiful  talk  he 
had  not  learned  to  love  because  he  had  not 
learned  to  serve. 

The  Levite  who  came  next  was  a  singer. 
In  the  Temple  service  at  Jerusalem  he  had 
sung  anthems  about  love  as  sweet  as  the 
songs  of  the  angels.  And  when  he  saw  the 
wounded  traveler  he  came  and  looked  on  him, 
but  he  too  passed  by  on  the  other  side.  He 
could  look  down  but  he  had  not  learned  the 
high  art  of  getting  down  to  the  place  where 
he  could  render  useful  service — and  thus  he 
showed  himself  defective  in  love. 

But  a  certain  Samaritan  as  he  journeyed 
saw  the  wounded  man  and  went  to  him,  pour- 
ing in  oil  and  wine— a  little  oil  on  the  band- 
ages to  make  them  soft,  and  a  little  wine 
down  the  sufferer's  throat  to  revive  him,  for 
he  was  half-dead.  He  then  got  him  up  and 
set  him  on  his  own  beast  and  took  him  to  an 
inn  and  took  care  of  him.     This  was  love. 


158    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

This  is  the  man  whose  portrait  is  held  before 
us,  and  when  we  inquire  as  to  what  we  shall 
do  to  inherit  eternal  life,  we  are  bidden  to 
''Go  and  do  likewise."  The  good  Samaritan 
had  learned  to  love  without  pretense  because 
he  had  learned  to  serve. 

It  is  in  this  high  privilege  of  service  that 
we  find  the  strongest  motive  impelling  us  to 
righteousness.  The  spirit  of  prudence,  a 
wholesome  regard  for  the  approbation  of 
others,  the  desire  for  one's  own  permanent 
well-being,  all  these  deter  men  from  evil  and 
incite  them  to  good.  There  is,  however,  a 
more  powerful  incentive  than  any  of  these 
considerations  are  able  to  furnish.  From  the 
upper  room  Christ  looked  out  upon  the  pain 
and  the  evil  of  the  w^orld,  and  thinking  of  its 
sore  need  of  such  a  life  and  of  such  service 
as  it  lay  within  His  power  to  furnish.  He 
named  that  motive  which  transcends  all  the 
rest.  "For  their  sakes,  I  sanctify  myself." 
He  found  in  an  intelligent  social  sympathy 
the  deepest  source  of  motive.  He  w^as  moved 
from  within  to  pledge  Himself  to  the  highest 
He  saw  by  the  fact  that  the  world  about  Him 
needed  that  type  of  life  beyond  all  else.  For 
their  sakes,  I  will  live  this  life! 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  159 

It  is  a  irrotive  which  holds  where  other 
motives  fail,  both  as  a  deterrent  from  evil 
and  as  an  incentive  to  right.  When  you  ap- 
peal on  the  ground  of  self-interest,  you  may 
tell  some  man  that  if  he  lives  an  evil  life  he 
will  go  to  hell  when  he  dies.  He  may  laugh 
in  your  face  and  tell  you  that  he  does  not 
believe  there  is  any  such  place— and  you  can- 
not instantly  demonstrate  to  him  the  sound- 
ness of  your  claim.  You  may  urge  him  to 
become  a  Christian  on  the  ground  that  his 
refusal  will  entail  upon  him  a  certain  loss  to 
his  inner  and  finer  nature.  With  a  shrug  of 
his  shoulders  he  may  inform  you  that  this  is 
his  own  affair,  that  if  he  does  suffer  loss  he 
will  bear  it  like  a  man  and  not  whine. 

But  let  such  a  man  really  feel  that  the  well- 
being  of  other  lives  is  at  stake  in  the  course 
of  action  he  elects— and  no  man  stands  so 
isolated  from  other  lives  he  could  serve  but 
that  this  is  true— and  you  have  a  new  and 
more  powerful  lever  to  pry  his  reluctant  con- 
science into  action.  Let  him  feel  that  some 
one,  a  mother,  a  wife,  or  a  child,  a  friend,  a 
neighbor,  or  a  pupil,  will  suffer  loss  and  hurt 
if  he  turns  from  the  higher  to  the  lower  and 
he  will  feel  the  force  of  those  considerations 


i6o    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

which  spring  into  being  because  of  the 
capacity  each  man  has  to  serve  the  lives  of 
others.  He  may  fling  away  his  own  chance 
but  the  thought  of  flinging  away  that  portion 
of  their  chance  to  reach  the  best,  for  which 
he  stands  responsible,  gives  him  pause. 

Here  we  find  the  mightiest  of  all  deter- 
rents against  the  coarser  vices.  Gambling, 
drunkenness,  and  licentiousness  are  only  pos- 
sible in  the  absence  of  any  genuine  social  in- 
terest. In  gambling  the  pleasure  of  one 
man's  gain  is  always  purchased  at  the  pain 
of  another's  loss.  In  legitimate  business  it 
is  not  so.  When  I  buy  a  suit  of  clothes  from 
the  tailor  we  are  both  profited.  I  would 
rather  have  the  suit  than  the  money  for  I 
cannot  go  about  the  streets  dressed  in  a  few 
bank  notes.  He  would  rather  have  the  money 
than  the  suit  for  he  cannot  eat  his  cloth.  But 
in  gambling,  the  low  grade  of  pleasure  in 
one's  own  gain  is  always  purchased  at  the 
cost  of  another's  pain  in  losing. 

In  the  vice  of  drunkenness  the  tippler  must 
be  made  to  see  that  the  tickling  of  his  own 
stomach,  the  warmth  and  glow  and  exhilara- 
tion which  intoxicants  bring,  are  all  pur- 
chased by  the  loss  and  pain  which  must  come 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  i6i 

upon  those  whose  hves  arc  intinialely  bound 
up  with  his  own,  through  his  lack  of  self- 
control. 

And  in  social  impurity  the  man  who  for 
an  hour  of  guilty  gratification  is  willing  to 
become  one  of  a  class  of  men  who  doom  a 
company  of  weak,  vain,  misguided  girls  to  a 
degradation  no  man  would  choose  for  his 
own  daughter  or  sister,  who  sentence  them 
to  a  swift  and  terrible  descent  into  physical 
and  moral  hell — the  man  who  pretends  to 
find  pleasure  in  that  is  lower  than  the  canni- 
bal or  the  beast.  The  cannibal  and  the  hyena 
mar  and  eat  only  the  bodies  of  their  victims, 
while  this  devilish  contempt  for  the  interests 
of  another  life  mutilates  the  mind  and  heart 
as  well.  "For  their  sakes,  even  more  than 
for  my  own  sake,"  the  decent  man  says,  "I  '11 
none  of  it.''  The  appeal  to  high  school  fel- 
lows and  to  college  men  for  clean  living  can 
be  best  made  when  the  form  of  motive  is  thus 
socialized. 

This  fine  bit  of  moral  experience  came  un- 
der my  notice  not  long  ago  in  my  own  city  in 
California.  There  was  a  mother  who  had 
undergone  a  capital  operation.  She  did  not 
rally  afterward;  the  loss  of  blood  and  the 


i62     THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

nervous  shock  of  it  brought  her  to  the  very 
verge  of  death.  The  surgeons  in  consuUa- 
tion  decided  that  she  could  not  possibly  re- 
cover unless  something  radical  was  done  at 
once,  that  indeed  her  only  hope  lay  in  the 
transfusion  of  blood  from  some  healthy, 
vigorous  nature. 

The  mother  had  three  sons,  great,  strapping 
fellows  in  the  heyday  of  their  youth.  They 
at  once  offered  themselves.  The  surgeons 
examined  them  to  see  which  one  would  be 
the  best  subject  for  that  critical  undertaking. 
The  examination  showed  them  all  sound, 
clean,  and  abundantly  alive.  They  were 
weighed  in  the  balance  of  severe  medical 
scrutiny  and  they  were  not  found  wanting. 
Any  one  of  the  three  would  meet  the  test. 
If  one  of  them  had  been  tainted  by  some 
wretched  vice,  if  his  vitality  had  been  low- 
ered by  some  wicked  indulgence,  he  would 
have  been  cut  off  from  the  chance  of  render- 
ing that  high  service  to  the  mother  in  her 
hour  of  need.  One  of  them  was  selected  and 
the  artery  of  strength  was  connected  with 
the  veins  of  weakness,  and  then  the  heart  of 
the  young  man,  clean  in  every  sense  of  the 
word,  pumped  into  that  life,  which  trembled 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  163 

on  the  brink,  a  fresh  store  of  vitality.  By 
this  transfusion  of  blood  the  mother's  life 
was  saved  and  restored. 

What  a  glorious  privilege  to  be  able  to 
shov^  oneself  fit  to  meet  the  demands  of  any 
exacting  service.  For  her  sake,  for  the  sake 
of  that  other  life  which  I  may  be  able  to 
save  in  some  crisis,  physical,  intellectual,  or 
moral,  I  will  live  the  life  myself!  It  fur- 
nishes the  strongest  form  of  motive  in  the 
moral  field. 

The  song  of  trust  and  of  aspiration  has 
been  hushed  in  many  hearts  these  days  by 
the  changing  conditions  of  religious  belief. 
When  some  man  believed  in  an  infallible 
church  or  in  an  infallible  book  or  in  some 
system  of  doctrine  implicitly  accepted,  faith 
was  easy  and  he  found  himself  singing.  But 
the  study  of  history  and  of  science,  of  liter- 
ature and  of  philosophy,  has  changed  all  this 
for  the  man  of  intelligence.  He  can  no 
longer  take  his  faith  upon  the  authority  of 
another.  He  feels  impelled  to  work  out  his 
own  theological  salvation  with  fear  and 
trembling.  And  because  the  task  is  hard  he 
often  feels  that  he  cannot  sing  the  Lord's 
song  in  this  strange  land. 


i64    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

Not  only  changes  in  theological  belief  but 
a  changed  attitude  in  regard  to  man's  moral 
freedom  has  a  tendency  to  silence  the  song. 
"Heredity  and  environment  have  us  bound 
hand  and  foot,"  men  are  saying.  Man  does, 
not  as  he  chooses,  but  as  he  must.  Whatever 
is,  had  to  be  and  whatever  will  be,  will  be, 
whether  we  like  it  or  not.  This  gloomy,  pes- 
simistic determinism  is  not  confined  to  the 
dark  closets  of  a  few  philosophers;  it  is 
boldly  preached  from  the  housetops  and  on 
the  street  corners.  When  men  thus  feel 
themselves  a  part  of  that  which  is  nothing 
more  than  mechanism,  the  song  of  hope  is 
hushed. 

And  the  song  of  aspiration  has  been  si- 
lenced in  other  hearts  by  the  changing  and 
advancing  ideals  in  the  world  of  industry. 
It  is  being  insisted  upon,  man- fashion,  that 
fortunes  shall  be  won  as  well  as  spent  or 
given  away  by  methods  which  harmonize 
with  the  higher  ideals  in  life.  It  was  a  clever 
paraphrase  which  said,  "A  new  command- 
ment give  I  unto  you  that  ye  remember  the 
week  day  to  keep  it  holy.''  It  seems  impos- 
sible to  many  people  to  reconcile  Christian 
ethics  with  the  present  economic  conditions 


FELLOWSHIP  THROUGH  SERVICE  165  I 

under  which  we  are  compelled  to  live.  And 
because  they  are  unwilling  to  sing  on  Sunday 
what  they  do  not  see  their  way  clear  to  prac-  , 

tice  on  Monday,  they  declare  their  inability  ' 

to  sing  the  Lord's  song  in  such  a  strange  ' 

land. 

What  shall  we  say  in  the  face  of  it  all? 
The  task  of  keeping  the  faith  and  of  singing  \ 

the  song  of  trust  has  become  undoubtedly  j 

a  different  and  a  harder  task.  The  changed  J 
religious  beliefs  of  the  people,  the  new  psy- 
chology making  this  human  nature  of  ours  j 
seem  a  more  complex  affair,  the  emergence  ' 
of  more  exacting  ideals  in  the  world  of  in-  , 
dustry  will  of  necessity  modify  the  song. 

But  all  this  need  not,  it  must  not,  drown  it. 
The  finer  discrimination  in  matters  of  belief, 
the  deeper  sense  of  all  that  is  involved  in  this  ' 

mysterious  thing  we  call  personality,  and  the         j 
moral  heroism  demanded  in  undertaking  to  ; 

make  the  six  days  of  labor  as  holy  as  the         i 
seventh  day  of  rest  and  worship,  all  this  will 
only  serve  to  bring  out  new  notes  and  finer         < 
accents  in  the  song  of  the  higher  life.    The         \ 
very  difficulty  and  vastness  of  the  undertak-  ! 

ing  will  serve  to  make  the  "attack"  of  the 
singers  more  sharply  defined  and  will  add  ! 


i66    THE  MODERN  MAN'S  RELIGION 

richness  and  impressiveness  to  the  final  vol- 
ume of  praise  rising  from  the  lips  of  men 
devoted  to  this  bolder  enterprise.  The  song 
of  aspiration  v^ill  be  sung  in  this  changed 
land  and  the  music  of  it  will  help  to  make  it 
the  Lord's  land.  It  will  be  sung  from  throats 
attuned  to  these  richer  harmonies  and  from 
hearts  inspired  by  the  wider  vision  of  pos- 
sible achievement.  Thus  through  the  joy 
and  fellowship  of  this  broader  service  men 
will  enter  more  deeply  into  that  form  of 
satisfaction  worthy  to  be  called  "the  joy  of 
their  Lord.'' 


Date  Due 

*r  22  '3^ 

F  ^6"  '1 

1 

^ 

Iliiliiillllllllillllilllillll 

1    1012  01004  9569 


